Author: Brian Lack

Today we introduced two improvements for the logging voter activity in the Election Manager:

Searchable Activity Log

The activity log is an audit trail of all significant activity related to the ballot. You can now search the activity log by Elector ID, by IP address, or by the type of activity.

Fine-Grained Logging

We now keep track of voter activity events leading up the final ballot submission. The “ballot opened” event reflects the voter accessing the ballot to start voting. The “ballot filled” event reflects the voter proceeding to the confirmation page. If a voter’s session is interrupted or if the voter changes her mind before final submission, you may find several “ballot opened” and/or “ballot filled” events leading up the “online vote” event.

These two improvements enhance the auditability of your election and also empower you to better help your voters. For example, if a voter reaches out to the election organizer needing assistance, you can now see where in voting process this particular voter “got stuck” and what steps remain to resolve the voter’s difficulty.

With the addition of the searchable activity log and fine-grained logging, Simply Voting has made it easier than ever for election organizers to track and understand voter behavior. The ability to search by Elector ID, IP address, or activity type gives you greater control over the audit trail and allows for quicker identification of any issues that may arise. These tools not only increase transparency but also provide valuable insights into the voting process, ensuring that you can assist voters efficiently. Whether it’s troubleshooting voter difficulties or confirming the integrity of your election, these updates provide the detailed information needed to support both your voters and the election’s overall security.

Contact us for more information!

At Simply Voting we’ve designed our voting system with many safeguards to ensure that the election officer cannot undermine the election’s integrity when using our Election Manager interface to self-administer their elections. Now, you can change election dates and electors in your Election Manager.

Based on feedback from our customers and on our experience running thousands of elections, we’ve determined that a few restrictions were making things difficult for the election officer without providing much benefit.

Therefore we have made the following changes to the Election Manager, effective immediately:

Election Dates

Before, you could not precisely change the start and end of the election once the ballot had been finalized. You could only “start now” or “end now”.

Now, you can change the exact start of the election (until the election has started), and you can change the exact end of the election (until the election has ended). Such changes are recorded in the Activity Log.

Managing Electors

Before, you could not make any changes to the electors once the ballot had been finalized. You could only correct bounced email addresses.

Now, you can add individual electors, delete individual electors and edit individual electors  up until the election has ended. Such changes are recorded in the Activity Log. You cannot delete any elector that already voted, and you cannot change the vote weight or segment (if applicable) of any elector that already voted.

If you have any concerns or questions regarding these changes, please contact support to discuss.

We now offer “validated write-ins”. A write-in candidate is a candidate in an election whose name does not appear on the ballot, but for whom voters may vote nonetheless by writing in the person’s name. Simply Voting always supported write-ins as a feature but election organizers would have to deal with voters specifying fictional characters or many permutations of the same name like this:

• John Doe
• John C. Doe
• J. Doe
• Doe, John

In many cases the voter is only supposed to write-in a fellow member of his organization. For that scenario we now offer “validated write-ins”.  When voters begin typing inside a validated write-in, an auto-complete feature lists all matching electors by name and forces the voter to select or type a valid name.

This makes writing-in much easier for the voter and also gives the election administrator much cleaner results to work with. Each write-in candidate will be valid and properly formatted.

This new validated write-in feature streamlines the voting process by ensuring accuracy and consistency in write-in submissions. By preventing errors and fictional entries, election organizers can save time during tabulation and focus on legitimate votes. Additionally, the auto-complete functionality enhances usability for voters, making it quicker and easier to cast a write-in vote while adhering to election guidelines. This improvement reinforces the integrity of the voting process while maintaining a seamless experience for all participants.

Contact us for more information!

Today we introduced several improvements to the way voting results are reported:

Sorted By Votes

Voting options (i.e. the candidates or choices to select on the ballot) are now sorted by the number of votes they received rather than alphabetically. This makes it much easier to determine who has won.

Options are also sorted by 1st preference votes on single transferable vote (STV) questions, so it is easier to follow the STV process of eliminating and electing candidates.

Better Handling of Write-ins

Election organizers may allow voters to write-in options which are not explicitly listed on the ballot. Write-ins are now sorted by the number of votes, which may make it less obvious to find duplicates. For example, “John Doe” may be nowhere near “John D”. Therefore election organizers may now download a spreadsheet containing write-in data for further analysis.

Intuitive Percentages

For plurality questions where voters may select multiple questions, the percentage shown next to the number of votes is now based on the total selections rather than the total voters. This makes more sense as all percentages will add up to 100%.

Voter Summary

For each question, we’ve simplified the voter summary. This summary indicates how many electors voted on the question and how many abstained.

If have any questions or concerns about how these changes to results may affect your organization, please contact support.

We recently made several usability enhancements to the Election Manager, focusing on simplifying navigation and improving workflow efficiency. These updates are designed to make managing your elections more intuitive and user-friendly, helping you save time and reduce complexity while achieving the best possible outcomes. Here’s what’s new:

Importing Electors

When you import elector data, there is now a check-box to indicate that the first row of data contains column headers. If the box is checked, the first row will be ignored. Hopefully we will never again see an extra elector with a name of “Name” and an email address of “Email”!

Navigation

We added an alternative way to navigate around your ballot, beyond the yellow ballot menu. From the ballot overview page there is now a list of links from which you can jump to the various sections of ballot management.

Sorting Tables

We added sortable column headers to tables in the following sections. You may click once to sort by that column in ascending order and click again to sort in descending order:

•     Ballots
•     Electors
•     Activity Log
•     Login History

Multiple Administrators

Many usability improvements were also made to our Multiple Administrators feature, which allows customers to create separate user accounts and have fine grain control over access to Election Manager:

•     Sort and search users
•     Improved bounce notification control
•     Changing usergroup of finalized ballots
•     User time zones

If you feel that your organization may benefit from Multiple Administrators, please contact support to find out more.