Are you planning a vote? Here are five quick tips to help make it a success.

Planning a vote means being across the detail. Instructions need to be issued to voters with everything they need to know to participate. These instructions should be as clear as possible, with the following things being defined at a minimum:

The best voting instructions are of little value if they’re never received. The two main options are post and email. Post is slower and more expensive, and never 100% reliable. We would recommend at least a week for delivery by post, plus time to generate the relevant documents. Email is faster, cheaper and more reliable, and it also offers the option to issue reminders throughout the voting period. In our experience, email distribution results in a higher voter participation rate.

How will people cast their votes in your election or ballot? The answer should ideally depend on the needs of your voting population. Whether it be in person, by post, or electronic, casting a vote should be convenient and easy to do. Providing a minimum of two voting channels, such as online and SMS, tends to overcome any access problems voters may have during the voting period.

We touched on voter authentication above. For more on the importance of this, see this post. Whatever is used, it is critical that authentication information is either familiar to each voter, or that voters know where to find it. Ideally, it will be in a similar format for all voters so that this can be made explicit in the voting instructions. GoVote generally recommends the combination of a PIN (generated by us) and one additional detail, such as a payroll or membership number.

Many of our clients are moving from postal voting to modern electronic voting channels. We understand the desire to make this a smooth transition, but does that mean continuing to offer postal voting as well? A good compromise is to utilise electronic voting methods but to distribute voting instructions by post. We’re yet to come across the voter who can send a letter but not utilise one of our telephone, SMS or online voting systems.

A secret ballot means that a voter’s choice is cast anonymously. It’s a method of protecting voter privacy, and also of preventing a voter from being intimidated or coerced to vote in a certain way.

We’re often asked how we maintain voter anonymity in relation to our online, SMS and telephone voting services. These electronic forms of voting take the concepts most Australian’s are familiar with and adapt them to the digital environment.

The upcoming Federal election is in the news at the moment. On polling day all eligible voters will:

Votes remain anonymous because the voter authentication process and the ballot paper are kept separate, and because the ballot papers are mixed together in the ballot box. The way in which an electronic secret ballot works isn’t so different to this. GoVote software creates two electronic files, one in a voter roll database and the other in a ballot result database, to maintain this separation. Let’s walk through the process.