The most important things to consider when setting up your ballot

The Settings and Questions tabs help you outfit a ballot to your specifications. This guide will give you more details about the most important options to consider.

You can alter your ballot in many different ways, including:

Ballot Type

You have two choices:

A Voting Ballot is the ballot type you’ll use most often to run most standard votes and elections. It allows you to set up the questions you want to ask and provide choices or selections for each question.

A Nomination Ballot is used to run a preliminary vote prior to your main election. You’ll use this to select the nominees eligible for the main event. Voters will be allowed to vote for anyone you’ve included in your voter list, and can vote for themselves if they choose.

Anonymous Voting

If you select Yes and enable anonymous voting, the identity of the voter and how they voted will be hidden from everyone, including all vote administrators.

Schedule

Time Zone sets the associated time zone for ballot times, email notifications, and vote confirmation receipts.

For example, let’s say you set the time zone to Eastern Time and have your ballot open at 9am ET. Everyone in New York (ET) would be able to start voting at 9am. If you also had voters in Los Angeles (PT), they would be able to start voting at 6am since they’re three hours behind.

To make your results available in real-time, choose the same date and time for Date When Results are Available and Ballot Opens.

Website Redirect

This is the website where your voters will be taken when they complete their ballot.

We recommend either your website or a customized “Thank You for Voting” page.

Choice Shuffling

Selecting Yes randomizes the order that choices will appear to your voters in the ballot.

It’s good practice to enable this in order to minimize any bias from one selection repeatedly showing up at the top or bottom of the list.

Ballot Instructions

We recommend describing what you’re voting on and what that means to your organization.

It’s good practice to dig into why the vote is important as well as how these decisions will impact your organization or group.

More settings

Show Review Page

Choose whether or not you want your voters to see a summary of their choices before submitting their vote.

Affidavit Statement

Choose whether or not you would like your voters to approve an affidavit.

Voter Email Confirmation (Premium Accounts Only)

Send an automatic confirmation email to your voters upon submission of their vote. This helps your voters keep a record of their choices.

Allow Parked Voting (Premium Accounts Only)

Allow your voters to change their selections after they have submitted their ballots. They are able to do this as many times as they want, but only between Ballot Open and Close times.

Personalized Email

You can send one-off emails to your voters, you would use this text when doing so.

Questions Tab

Build ballot with choices, selections, or options your voters will be able to vote on.

Question Examples:

Who do you want to be the President?

Michelle Bowman

Robert Levitt

Tim Jones

Karen Upton

Should the current President be retained for next year?

Yes

No

Abstain

Question Type

Selecting Standard allows voters to select one or more choices, in no particular order of preference.

Choosing Ranked lets voters rank the selections according to their preference.

Weighted Question (Premium Accounts Only)

Enabling Weighted Questions lets certain voters to have more influence over voting outcomes.

Split Weights only works when multiple choices are enabled. It allows voters to split their voting weight on multiple choices/candidates within a question.

Apply Filter (Premium Accounts Only)

Use this to only show this question to certain segments of your voter list. If using, we recommend that you first upload your voter list with the requisite filters prior to adding filters to your questions. You can always go back and change or delete filters.

For more information on filtering, read our Guide to Filters.

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