Voting rounds
A “voting round” is an election in and of itself. Establishing voting rounds is a necessary precondition for voters to be able to cast ballots. There can be several voting rounds within one election event. In the “Voting rounds” overview page, you can create a new voting round, archive a voting round as well as see the status of other existing voting rounds.
*Note: If you are planning on using Live Conference Voting, go to the section on Slides.
There are 6 stages in which a voting round can be at. As the election progresses, the voting round will move through these stages in the following manner: “Scheduled,” “Currently Active,” “Voting completed,” “Closed,” and finally “Archived“.
Click “+ New” next to “Voting rounds” to create a new voting round.
You will then see the following items:
Title: The title of the voting round which will be displayed to the voters and show up in the vote receipt.
Internal Name: The internal name of the voting round; this is only visible to users of the system.
Reference: A unique identifier for the specific voting round. Useful for auditing purposes.
Status: You may set your voting round as Closed, Open, or Scheduled. See the section Status for a detailed explanation of these terms.
Ongoing results (this is a feature flag): If toggled on, system users can extract preliminary results and result report from the voting round as the election and the voting is ongoing and active.
External tallies (this is a feature flag): If toggled on, this feature allows for adding and excluding external votes in the specific voting round. When this feature is toggled on in a voting round, it enables an extra tab in the voting round called “External tally”, which then allows you to add external votes under “External tallies” and exclude voters under “External exclusions”. Read more on this here.
Identifiable: If toggled on, system users can see how each voter voted in the raw result files. The voters will see a message upon opening their ballot stating that the vote is non-anonymous. We recommend that this is only used when the rules of your election clearly state that the vote must be non-anonymous.
Demo: Sets the voting round as a demo round, or one which may be used for testing purposes. This allows demo voters to vote in the voting round.
Recasting: This means that the voters are able to vote as many times as they wish, with only the last vote being the one that counts. This is enabled by default. With “Recasting” toggled off, your voter can only vote once and cannot access the ballot again once they have submitted a vote.
Contests - Displays available contests in list form, with a search option available.
Here, you must select at least one contest to be available for voting in your voting round. You may choose from the “Available” list at the bottom or search in the search bar. The order in which they appear on the list from top to bottom is the order in which they will be presented to the voter when several contests are selected together. The voter will only be able to see contests in which they are eligible to vote in the UI.
To read more on how to create, edit, and delete voting rounds, click here.
Open status When set to “Open,” the contest will be visible to the voter as soon as they log in. When the voting is done, you can manually close the voting round by clicking on . Scheduled status When set to “Scheduled,” you will need to provide a time and date for when the contest should open to voting. You can do this in the “Schedule” section located under the “Main” section. Click “Schedule enable at” to set the date, month, year, hour, and minute at which the election should commence. When configured, click “Update configuration” to save any changes. When you are creating a voting round, you may also set a closing time for the round. When the time is up, the voting round will close automatically and move to “Closed,” indicating that voters may no longer log into the election. You will find all of the scheduled voting rounds under “Scheduled” or “Currently active.” Closed status When a voting round is set to “Closed,” the voter will be met by a message stating that the voting round is closed, and they will not be able to log into the election. If you set a voting round as “Closed” when you first create it, it will be moved to “Available.” To change its status to “Open,” just click . If you want to make it “Scheduled,” you must click on the voting round and subsequently click, change the status, and then click “Update voting round.” |
3.1. Explanations of the voting round symbols
The yellow beaker symbol shows that the voting round is only for Demo voters.
The graph symbol with the 0 next to it shows that no votes are registered in the selected voting round. This number will change as votes are cast in the voting round.
When a voting round is created, the option to archive it appears in the right-top corner. The “Archive” button will automatically close the voting round and move it from its current phase to the “Archived” tab.
This functionality allows you to hide old voting rounds that you no longer need for the event. When you archive a voting round the votes and result will move with it. When it is in the archived state the voting round can no longer be edited. Note that votes and results will also be cleared for archived voting rounds if you clear the election so remember to download any data from the event.
Once a voting round has been moved to the “Archived” tab, it can be restored back to its previous phase to allow editing the voting round again.
There can be multiple voting rounds active simultaneously – this means that voters can vote on multiple ballots at the same time.
Video of the voter flow
Disclaimer: This is a feature flag, and needs to be enabled at the Organisation level.
Prefilling ballots allows for the pre-selection of ballot choices on a voting round. When voters access the ballot, they will be presented with the contests already filled out with those default choices. The voter can change the selection or submit the prefilled selection.
The feature can be configured for each voting round:
The selection will be shown for each voting round:
6.1. Voter POV
Once the ballot has been prefilled in the backend, this selection will be shown to the voters as default choices.
From here, the voter has three choices:
“Back” – the voter can edit the prefilled selections to make partial adjustments.
“Clear pre-filled selections” – the voter can fully clear the selections and manually fill in their answers.
“Submit vote” – the voter can submit the prefilled selections as they are.