Forum - September 2008

Reducing expenses is just one of many reasons cited for migrating elections from paper to the Web. The process itself can be friendlier for both the voter and election administrator. For example, suppose there are four open slots on the board of directors with eight individuals contesting those slots. With a traditional paper ballot, it’s not possible to prevent a voter from selecting five or more candidates. Web-based ballots however may be scrubbed at the moment they are submitted to guarantee compliance with voting rules so that not a single ballot is spoiled. The ability for the voter to correct mistakes prior to final submittal helps ensure the ballot is tabulated correctly and there is no confusion over whom the voter selected.

MANY ASSOCIATIONS, HESITANT TO
STOP OFFERING PAPER BALLOTS COLD
TURKEY, CONDUCT A HYBRID ELECTION
IN THE FIRST YEAR OR TWO OF MAK-
ING THE SWITCH ONLY TO DISCOVER
THAT THE PAPER PARTICIPATION IS SO
LOW THAT THEY GO TO WEB-ONLY.

Additional advantages include ballot shuffling, which displays the names of the candidates in random order each time a Web ballot is requested to ensure no candidate enjoys an advantage due to the placement of his or her name. It also allows for ballot personalization. Personalization in this context doesn’t mean simply displaying the voter’s name somewhere on the ballot. Instead, suppose your association has different membership classes — say student and professional. These two groups of voters have some common items in the election, but each also has some questions on the ballot unique to them. To make things even more interesting, let’s also suppose the organization has two dozen shared interest groups that anyone — student, professional or other — may be eligible to participate in. In the past, this probably meant conducting entirely separate elections for each of these different classes of voters. However, with Web ballots, it’s possible to present the voter with a single ballot containing all the positions and/or referendums for which that particular voter is eligible to vote on. This is certainly a more voter-friendly process than dealing with multiple paper ballots, but it’s also likely to result in higher voter participation as each little mini-election represented on the ballot piggybacks on the voter participation of every other mini-election. To further increase voter participation, the ability to send e-mail reminders midway through an election only to those who’ve not yet voted is a simple matter and almost always results in a spike in voting in the 36 hours following the reminder.

For the election administrator, once one of these complex ballots has been configured, it may be saved as a template (depending on the election system in use) for reuse in future elections so all that needs to be done to have an election up and running is to enter the names of candidates with their biographical data. The election administrator also can retrieve results one second after the close of the election without any need for a recount since the possibility for a miscount has been eliminated from the equation.

★★★★★

THE HYBRID OPTION

At this point, you may be thinking about the reasons your association could not do online elections. Maybe you don’t have e-mail addresses for all your voters. Or you have some members without reliable access to a computer or the Internet. In such cases, your association could use a hybrid election permitting voters to use either paper or the Web.

There’s no one right way for conducting hybrid elections, and the company that handles your election should be able to tailor one that is right for you. For best results, don’t continue to default to paper ballots and offer the ability to vote online as an option. Voters will vote by whatever means is placed directly in their hands. Place a paper ballot directly in the hands of a voter and that’s what they’ll use, leaving you disappointed with the online participation rate. However, by taking the reverse approach, that is, defaulting to a Web ballot and offering paper ballots as an option, you’ll see a much higher percentage of participation on the Web, usually with no drop in overall participation. In fact, many associations, hesitant to stop offering paper ballots cold turkey, conduct a hybrid election in the first year or two of making the switch only to discover that the paper participation is so low that they go to Web-only.