Contest
Under the “Contests” item in the left-hand side menu, you can create and/or import contests. Once you have created a new contest, you will see the basic and advanced settings which you need to configure to create a ballot.
These are the basic settings you must configure in order to create a new ballot.
Internal name: This is an optional field, and it changes what the contest is called in the backend. This name is only visible for you as a user in the backend.
Reference: This is a unique reference ID for the contest. It is auto-generated if left blank.
Title: This is the title of the ballot which will be visible to the voter.
Description: This is a description of the content of the ballot, which will be visible to the voter. This field is not mandatory.
Question: Here, you may write the question of the ballot the voter has to answer. This field is not mandatory.
Blank option accent color: If you want the blank option to differ visually from other options, you may give it a different color by choosing on the color picker or inserting a color code in hex format.
Note: This is used for a “hand raise” vote in Live Conference Voting, and requires you have access to this feature.
*Go to Create a contest and Import a contest for the how-to guides on creating and importing contests.
In the advanced settings (available by clicking on the “<” symbol to the right), you can configure the voting method, result calculations, and more.
1. Contest attributes
Voting type: Refers to the method used for submitting votes.
The default voting type (or simple vote submission) involves marking option(s) on a ballots without ranking their selection. A ballot with default voting emulates voting on a standard paper ballot where a voter places a cross (or X) next to their desired choice.
The other voting method is ranked voting, a method in which voters place numbers next to their choices in order or preference. More specifically, their first selection is marked as “1” and is given the highest priority ranking. The higher the number, the lower the priority. This ruleset has special result calculations related to the prioritization method, and the ordering of preferences is important for the generation of results.
Minimum and maximum votes per voter: The highest and lowest number of options a voter may select on their ballot.
Votes allowed per option (this is a feature flag): The amount of votes a voter can cast for the same option.
Seats: The amount of options/candidates which may win a seat when generating a result.
Randomize options: When toggled on, the root options are displayed in random order for voters in their frontend.
*Note: If you are using lists in options and want to randomize the sub-options on the lists, you will have to toggle this on in each of the parent list options.
2. Vote submission
Blank vote submission: In the dropdown menu, you may configure the submission of blank ballots in the following three ways:
“Active choice” means that blank is an active voting option which will appear on the ballot.
“Implicit” means that blank won’t be shown as an option on the ballot, but if the voter does not choose any available option, and clicks “Continue” the ballot will then be submitted as a blank vote.
“Disabled,” as the name suggests, disallows blank ballots. This means that voters cannot actively or implicitly choose to submit a blank ballot.
Allow distributing weight: This allows voters with a weight of more than 1 to distribute their weight amongst several options or candidates within a contest, rather than making them allocate all of their weight to a single option/candidate.
Disregard voter weights: The system will ignore individual voter weights when calculating voting results. All weights will instead be 1.
Search form: This enables a search bar for voters to search for options.
Add option description on confirmation page: This enables the option descriptions to be shown to voters in the vote confirmation page. This is intended so that voters can review all details of the selected options before submitting their vote.
3. Mode
Modes are different ways to display the options of a contest. There are two modes: Gallery View and List View.
Options in Gallery view
Options in List view
4. Lists
Lists are a way to group options together. This feature is useful when working with parties and candidates. This feature will only appear if Mode has been set to Lists.
Lists can be collapsed: When this option is enabled, the voter is allowed to collapse lists on the ballot.
Lists are presented collapsed: When this option is enabled, the voter will have to expand the collapsed list to see the options in said list.
5. Voter groups
This allows you to select which voter groups can vote on a given ballot. You may choose all groups, one, some, or none. You can only choose voter groups if you have already created them. If you have not done this yet, you may do it later.
6. Result calculation
See the section Result calculation for a thorough explanation of how the system calculates the results when using different voting methods.
Handling of ties (only possible for the default result method): If enabled, the system will randomly pick a winner in case of a tie.
Consensus required: If selected, the system will require that a certain portion of the present voters agree on an option before an option can win a seat. This portion (or fraction) can be customized. For example, should a candidate/option need an absolute majority of votes to win, the portion of required votes should be set to 50.01% here.
Disregard blank votes: If this is enabled, blank votes will be disregarded when calculating percentages. This will also affect the consensus calculation.
Count unvoiced votes as blank: When this is enabled, voters which had an active session at the time the ballot is open but have not voted will count as having voted blank.
*Note: This feature can only be used in Live Conference Voting mode.
Show result percentages: If enabled, the system will display the percentages of the vote received by each option on a ballot.
Show scroll to bottom button: When this feature is enabled, the voter can skip directly to the bottom of the options. This is particularly useful when there are many options on a ballot, to help the voter navigate to the bottom of the page to submit their vote.
2.1. Result calculation
The options available here will differ based upon which option you chose (default or ranked voting) at the top of the advanced settings.
Default voting
For the default result method, there are two methods available: regular summation and D’Hondt.
Regular summation
This means that the option with the highest total (or plurality) of votes is the winner. This method merely entails counting and adding up the total number of votes each option receives.
D’Hondt
The “D’Hondt” method is a highest-averages method used for allocating seats proportionately to the votes received by a party or list. This method is widely used in party-list proportional representation elections, especially in European countries.
For this method to work properly, you must also assign a specific number of seats – read more on this here. In this example, we have set the number of seats to be allocated to 10, which means that these 10 seats are to be proportionately distributed among the lists in the vote.
After all the votes have been collected, each list’s total number of votes is then divided by 1, 2, 3, and so forth up to the total number of seats – this creates a list of quotients. The 10 highest values in this list correspond to one seat allocation.
The results will show the proportion of votes per list as well as the distribution of seats per list.
*Note that this method cannot be combined with the “Consensus required” configuration.