Election committee
Disclaimer: This is a feature flag, and needs to be enabled at the Organisation level.
The Election Committee feature allows designated members to review and approve election configuration changes through a digitally signed ceremony. This guide provides an overview of the various functionalities within election committees, as well as instructions on how to utilize them.
To start, this feature must also be enabled for each election under “Summary”. Please note that, to enable the election committee, the election cannot have a board.
Once the feature is enabled, an “Election committee” appears on the left-hand menu, under the “Advanced” section.
Setting up the election committee
The first step in setting up an election committee is to invite committee members. To start the setup process, click the “Setup committee” button. This will lead you directly to the “Election committee members” box.
Then click on “Add members”, and select the user to invite into the committee. Election committee members must be the first users within the Organization, that is, they need to be either Organization Owners or Organization Managers – see more here.
When inviting a backend user as a committee member, you can also choose to make their signature a mandatory one in the signing ceremonies.
Once the members have successfully signed in and joined the committee, the threshold for the signing ceremony needs to be set. This threshold corresponds to the minimum amount of signatures needed to conclude a signing ceremony, that is, to review and approve any changes to the election.
Note that the members' threshold can only be set once at least one member has actively joined the committee, and it should be set before initialising the election’s board – to avoid any future errors within the board.
An active member has a green icon next to their email, as the image below shows:
Note: an election committee can only be deleted if no board is initiated.
Without board:
After board initialization:
Signing ceremony
A signing ceremony is a process by which election committee members can review and approve configuration changes to the election. When changes have been made to the election, a yellow pop-up will appear to start a signing ceremony.
You can click on the hyperlinked “here”, and this will direct you to the signing ceremony page. To start a signing ceremony, give it a title and define whether the committee members should be notified or not.
Note that the ceremony title’s language follows the backend language, and it cannot be changed once a ceremony starts. Additionally, before starting the signing ceremony, you can see a list of all the current configurations of the election.
In the configuration changes section, you can see the label: 
A signing ceremony is triggered when changes are made to the election’s configuration. Only changes that are directly written into the DBB will trigger a ceremony. See a full list below of which features can trigger a ceremony:
Additionally, when a signing ceremony is running, it is not possible to make any further configuration changes to the election. For new changes, the ceremony either needs to be canceled or completed. Only then can new changes be made.
Status of signing ceremonies
A signing ceremony can have 3 statuses: “In progress”, “Completed”, and “Cancelled”. Only an admin can start, finish, and/or cancel signing ceremonies.
Finally, all ceremonies are then registered in the “Previous ceremonies” page. On this page, you can see the title of the ceremony and its status.
User flow
1. Joining a committee
When you have been invited to be a part of an election committee, you should receive an email like the one below:
Click “Join committee” to be directed to Electa, where you first need to sign in and then specify a password.
Once you have set your password, click “Set passphrase and join” – now you have successfully joined the election committee, and are ready to sign ceremonies.
2. Signing a ceremony
Once a signing ceremony has started, you can access it by either clicking on the hyperlinked “here” in the yellow pop-up or by clicking on the blue box “Signing ceremony in progress”.
Inside the specific signing ceremony, you can see and review all the changes made to the election, as well as submit your decision – to either “Sign”, if you agree with the changes”, or “Do not sign”, if you do not agree with the changes
Under “Configuration changes”, you can see and review all the changes made to the election.
When you are ready to submit a decision regarding the election changes, click “Submit decision”.
This will open a pop-up screen from which you can choose to “Sign” or “Do not sign” depending on whether you agree or not with the changes.
If you wish to “Sign”, please input your password in the “Passphrase” text field.
Instead, if you select “Do not sign”, you are not required to input your password, but are strongly recommended to leave a comment explaining your decision.
Click “Submit decision” to finalize your signing process.
3. Completing/Canceling ceremony
There are two ways of finalizing a signing ceremony: by either completing it or canceling it. These can be done from the specific ceremony’s page, by clicking one of the following buttons:
Canceling a signing ceremony is essential rejecting the ceremony - for example, if the threshold of signatures was not met or if the election committee members did not sign (that is, did not approve the changes). When canceling the ceremony, all collected signatures are lost, and the configuration changes remain pending. From here, you need to start a new ceremony to review and get the changes approved by the committee members.
Completing a signing ceremony can only be done once the threshold of needed signatures is reached. This action means that the changes in configurations of the election have been approved and will be implemented and go live.
Any cancelled and/or completed will be recorded in the system, and you can find them under “Previous ceremonies”.