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Category: Customer Stories

Simplify Your Co-op Elections with Simply Voting

Posted on by Clémence Campillo

Ensuring fair, secure, and efficient elections is crucial for cooperative governance. When elections are complicated or time-consuming, it can create unnecessary stress and inefficiencies for co-op administrators and members alike. That’s why many NFCA member co-ops trust Simply Voting, the leading online voting solution designed to simplify your co-op elections.

Simply Voting’s partnership with the Neighboring Food Co-op Association

The Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA) is a federation of food co-ops across New England & New York state working toward a shared vision of a thriving co-operative economy, rooted in a healthy, just and sustainable food system.

Simply Voting has been a proud partner of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association and its member cooperatives for several years, providing an online voting tool to assist in democratic endeavors. Our system is tailored to meet the unique needs of cooperatives, whether you’re conducting board elections, meeting votes, or other important decision-making processes. Simply Voting provides a transparent, accessible, and cost-effective solution that ensures every vote counts.

Other co-ops trusting our online voting system:

Simplify Your Co-op Elections with Simply Voting

Advantages of online voting for Co-ops:

We understand that for many cooperatives and credit unions, having a large membership with low turnout is one of the challenges your organization may face. With Simply Voting, co-ops and credit unions can easily manage elections with confidence, ensuring accessibility and fairness for all members. Here are some advantages:

  • Conveniency

Online voting allows co-op members to vote from anywhere at any time. This flexibly allows more members to take part in the voting process. That way, important decisions can be made with a lower risk of a low turnout.

  • Flexible Voter Authentication

Voting passwords are generated for each eligible voter and distributed by email or postal letter. Simply Voting can also integrate with your existing authentication method for a single-sign-on solution.

  • Security and transparency

Online voting offers strong security features, ensuring that every vote is protected and counted accurately. Each action made throughout the election process is tracked and saved in an auditable log ensuring transparency.

  • Dedicated voting website

Simply Voting will provide an exclusive voting website for your elections, branded with your logo & colors. Easy to use, cross-platform, accessible and professional.

  • Kiosk Voting

Kiosk Voting allows you to set up and manage “voting poll kiosks.” These kiosks allow secure, efficient and low-maintenance voting in person on one or more communal devices.

You can find more details about the services we offer to co-ops here.

Ready to make the switch to online voting?

Co-ops that have implemented Simply Voting have reported increased voter participation, reduced administrative burden, and a smoother overall election experience. Join the many co-ops already using Simply Voting to streamline their election process and enhance democratic engagement within their organizations.

Sign up here to start!

Online Voting for Universities and Colleges

Posted on by Clémence Campillo

In the last decade, universities and colleges have progressively adopted online voting for their elections. Whether it is for a student union election, faculty councils or an election for other campus groups, online voting tools offer a more flexible secured and transparent way to engage the university community.

4 Benefits of online voting for universities:

  1. Increased participation

Traditional voting methods often face low turnout due to the difficulty for voters to be present in person on campus, during limited voting hours. With online voting, students can cast their ballot easily from anywhere and organizers to keep their election open longer allowing their electors to vote at any time on or off campus, during the day or late at night. This increased accessibility encourages more voters to engage in the voting process.

2. Reduced errors

Online voting also helps reduce human errors in the election process like the management of election data and vote tabulation. Thanks to it secure balloting design, online voting can prevent mistakes like, both on the voter’s end, preventing accidental ballot spoiling, to preventing counting errors or keeping track of ballots by election administrators.

3. Security and transparency

Online voting offers strong security features, ensuring that every vote is protected and counted accurately. Each action made throughout the election process is tracked and saved in an auditable log ensuring transparency throughout the process along with trusted, legitimate results helping build trust among all important stakeholders in the election process, from voters, to election organizers, to candidates. Maintaining anonymity, while also preventing voters from attempting to vote multiple times, helps ensure votes are recorded accurately and securely ensuring the integrity of the election.

4. Flexible process

The flexibility of online voting allows ballots to be customized to the specific needs of an election. Organizers can adjust the number of positions on the ballot, the number of candidates for each position, and how many candidates’ voters can vote for. They can decide or allow abstention or not, allow write-ins or not. Elections can also be tailored to specific groups, by restricting participation to some positions up to election to only a specific group such as a specific major or a group of students like international students allowing only voters directly affected by a decision to be able to cast a vote.

Types of elections in Universities and Colleges:

  • Board and governance

University boards usually consist of faculty staff and students. They vote on decisions like policies, budgets and strategies to promote the programs and faculties. Universities also hold elections for governance-related positions such as faculty councils, deans of academic committees.

  • Student unions

Student unions are essential to university life, representing the interests of students. Election for union officers like presidents, vice-president, treasurer etc. are essential to ensure a great representation of the student body.

We’ve been helping universities run elections for over 20 years, check out this example:

Montgomery College Logo

Montgomery College is a Maryland community college with three main campuses counting 60,000 students, 1,500 faculty members and 1,300 other staff. They started using Simply Voting in 2012.

They choose online voting because they needed flexible and robust elections to elect governance positions and wanted to minimize staff involvement in the election management. They opted for fully managed elections with single sign-on integration for voter login and organize their election in 2 rounds:

  • The nomination round: Voters nominate any student, administrator, staff, or faculty
  • The election round: Voters vote for representatives based on constituency

They have reported a streamlined process, reduced workload, and increased voter participation over the years.

Here’s what Montgomery College had to say about their experience with our platform:

Rethinking Your Voting Process? Let’s Make It Simple, Secure, and Trusted.

With our extensive experience and a secure, flexible platform trusted by leading institutions, universities can move beyond the limitations of in-house tools or opaque systems. By partnering with a neutral third party, they reduce internal burden, build trust, and drive higher engagement from students and faculty ensuring decisions reflect the true voice of their community.

Contact us!

Case Study: Celebration Residential Owners Association

Posted on by Clémence Campillo

The Celebration Residential Owners Association (CROA) serves a large community of approximately 4,300 homes, with over 10,000 residents in Celebration, Florida. Since 2011, CROA has utilized Simply Voting for their Board of Director elections and occasional special votes.

CROA had several requirements regarding their elections:

  • A self-service online voting portal that would allow them to manage all their elections easily and efficiently;
  • A user-friendly voting system that would make online voting accessible and convenient for all electors in order to increase participation and accessibility;
  • A cost-effective solution that covered their efficiency and security requirements.

Simply Voting’ solution:

Simply Voting offers a secure, user friendly and cost-effective voting platform that allows election organizers to run self-managed elections using our easy-to-use election manager.

In addition to the standard features offered in all elections, Simply Voting offers other product features to fit more specific requirements:

  • Manual vote entry

With the Manual Vote Entry tool, election administrators can convert a physical paper ballot into a digital record, thus allowing tabulating of paper ballots alongside online collected ballots.

Election administrators identify the voter associated with a paper ballot and then enter their choices into the Simply Voting system. The final results will note how many votes were manually input by administrators, and how many votes were marked as spoiled by administrators.

  • Weighted voting

Weighted voting allows election organizers to assign each voter a vote weight that will be applied once their ballot is cast. The final results will take into account vote weight, and note how much vote weight was cast in total as well.

For example, an HOA could assign a different weight to their electors depending on the number of units they own.

  • Candidate withdrawals

From time to time, election organizers may encounter the need to withdraw one or more candidates from the ballot. We offer the capability to mark those candidates as withdrawn on the ballot.

When a candidate is withdrawn from an active election, their name is struck through on the ballot, and the word WITHDRAWN is displayed in bold red type next to their name. Electors will still be able to vote for the withdrawn candidate if they wish to do so.

  • Vote confirmation emails

We offer the ability to send a confirmation email once an elector had voted to confirm them that their vote was recorded.

The results:

Opting for a self-serve approach, the Celebration Residential Owners Association found the Simply Voting administrative portal user-friendly and efficient for managing elections, in addition to being cost-effective.

By introducing online voting, CROA aimed to enhance convenience to voters, and therefore increase overall voter turnout. Over the years, online voter turnout has steadily grown, from 9% in 2011 to 35% for the 2024 board elections, with participation reaching as high as 55% for special referendums of high interest.

Looking to run an election for your HOA?

If online voting is permitted in your state, feel free to reach out to us. We will be happy to provide a solution tailored to meet your requirements.

Over 1,000 unions chose Simply Voting for their online elections, here is why you should too

Posted on by Clémence Campillo

Unions have long been essential in advocating for workers rights. But for a union to be effective, its members need to be engaged in the decision-making process. Understanding what a union is and how they work is essential to understand the importance of online elections for unions.

What is a union?

A union is an organized group of workers who join together to protect and advance their collective interests such as attaining better wages and benefits, improving working conditions etc. Unionized workers have the ability to negotiate from a position of strength to amplify their voice and ensure their rights are respected.

Unions are democratic organizations therefore elections are extremely important, whether to elect leadership, approve contracts or make decisions on strikes on a national, provincial and local level.

In most cases these elections are secret and majority votes. Traditionally, these votes are conducted in person, at polling stations, using paper ballots during meetings.

However, these methods, often excludes a large portion of the membership due to various reasons: schedule conflicts, geographical distance or even health issues that can make in difficult to attend elections in person.

Online voting offers a simple and affordable solution to these challenges.

  • Increased participation

    Online voting allows members to vote from anywhere at any time. This flexibly allows more members to take part in the voting process, helping reach quorum more easily and making the unions decision truly representative of the entire membership. That way, important decisions can be made with a lower risk of a low turnout and procedural delays.

    • Cost and time efficient

    Traditional voting methods require time consuming preparation such as organizing meeting and polling stations as well as printing and counting ballots. Online voting eliminates all those steps and therefore reduces administrative cost and time and well as the possibility of human error in the process. It also offers quick, real-time results which accelerates the decision-making process.

    • Security and transparency

    Online voting offers strong security features, ensuring that every vote is protected and counted accurately. Each action made throughout the election process is tracked and saved in an auditable log ensuring transparency throughout the process along with trusted, legitimate results helping build trust among the union members.

    Hybrid elections

    While online voting offers great benefits, we also offer other options that can be combined with online voting still increasing participation and security as well as reducing cost.

    • Mail-in paper ballots

    In addition, to online voting it is also possible to offer electors the possibility to mail-in ballots. Simply voting will print and mail out letters with personalized voting instructions for online or mail-in ballot voting along with a return envelope and accurately process mailed-in ballots in-house

    • In person paper ballots

    If you wish to continue in-person paper ballot voting along with online voting, we also offer a voter strike-off feature to block paper ballot voters from online voting, in real-time. When a paper ballot is provided, the election official will mark the elector as voted offline so they can no longer vote online. The paper ballots will be counted independently of the online voting system according to the union’s procedures.

    • Kiosk voting

    It is possible to continue having polling stations along with online voting using our kiosk feature. These kiosks allow secure, efficient and low-maintenance voting in person for electors that prefer to vote from a polling station.

    For unions looking to increase participation, make voting more accessible and reduce cost, online voting is the next step. Whether you opt for online voting only or a hybrid solution, Simply Voting will make your election process more accessible, transparent and secured.

    Ready to make the switch to online voting?

    CONTACT US

    Successful Online Voting Solutions for the 2024 Halifax Regional Municipal Election

    Posted on by Clémence Campillo

    Simply Voting and Intelivote powered the online voting system and managed election logistics, enabling the municipality to elect its first new mayor in over a decade.

    Internet voting was the preferred method for 62% of voters, 13% more compared to 2020.

    Montreal, Canada – November 26, 2024 – Simply Voting, in collaboration with Intelivote Systems, successfully delivered online voting solutions for the 2024 Halifax Regional Municipality Election. The innovative approach resulted in a significant increase in online voter turnout, with 69% of votes being cast digitally (internet, kiosk and telephone voting), contributing to a smooth and accessible election process.

    In a historic result, the municipality’s residents elected Andy Fillmore. He is a former MP, as its first new mayor in over a decade. Fillmore won decisively, defeating his nearest competitor by 21,000 votes. Voter engagement was at the forefront. Housing and affordability set as Fillmore’s top priorities as he prepares to take office.

    Simply Voting provided the online, kiosk and telephone voting platforms for the election. While Intelivote offered logistical support, including election project management. The advance voting election, held from October 8 to October 16. This period allowed voters to cast their ballots using a unique personal identification number via internet or phone. Paper ballots was available only on election day, October 19.

    Key Election Stats:

    • Voter turnout reached 36.8% of the 335,341 eligible voters, with 123,529 total votes cast.
    • 62% of voters chose to vote online, representing 76,386 individuals vs 32% votes by paper ballot.
    • During advanced voting 90.4% of the votes were cast online using Simply Voting’s platform.
    • With 58% of voters using desktop devices and 42% using mobile devices.
    • 5% of voters opted for telephone voting, while 2% used the kiosk voting option.
    • The voting process involved over 1,200 election workers, with months of behind-the-scenes planning.

    The success of the election was praised by Returning Officer Iain MacLean: “We are extremely satisfied with the voting solution provided by Simply Voting and Intelivote. This year’s election goal was to ensure accessibility, and the results confirm we met that objective.”

    Brian Lack, President of Simply Voting, expressed pride in the company’s contribution: “It’s incredibly gratifying to see our online voting solutions set a new record for online voter turnout. The overwhelming preference for internet voting reaffirms the importance of providing an easy-to-use, accessible platform for all voters.”

    Dean Smith, President of Intelivote Systems, also emphasized the collaboration’s success: “Intelivote Systems provided an electronic voting solution to 43 additional separate municipal elections in the province-wide 2024 Municipal Elections allowing up to 94% of all Nova Scotian electors an opportunity to vote safely and conveniently, including over 335,000 electors in HRM.  Intelivote’s evoting management with expert knowledge of Municipal Election processes, partnered with Simply Voting’s technology, allowed our clients to deliver successful and secure elections across the municipality and the province.”

    About Simply Voting Inc.
    Simply Voting Inc. is a full-service provider of secure, web-based electronic voting solutions. Over 5,000 organizations from municipalities to universities to unions rely on Simply Voting to safely manage their election. For more information, visit www.simplyvoting.com.

    About Intelivote Systems Inc.

    Intelivote is a services company which provides eDemocracy solutions to Government at all levels, hundreds of Municipalities in both Ontario and Nova Scotia, political parties, unions, associations and other National and International organizations that regularly conduct elections, surveys, referendums, plebiscites, or other events that require secure, accessible member participation. For more information, visit www.intelivote.com.

    Realtor Association Elections Made Simple: Nova Scotia Case Study

    Posted on by Brian Lack

    The Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS Case Study is a demonstration of how innovative strategies and solutions were implemented to enhance operational efficiency, and drive success within the real estate industry.

    Real estate is a booming industry creating headlines across Canada. But as hard as real estate agents are working to build our economies, they are also engaged deeply on a regional level, subscribing to their local real estate associations. And like any association with a membership, they require a vote.

    Two years ago, the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS® (NSAR) were running their vote themselves. Managing 7 regions all voting at a live event, the process was cumbersome and expensive. In 2018, Simply Voting met NSAR at the Canadian Real Estate Association AGM. After discussing their current process, we designed a solution using segmentation. This segmentation allowed NSAR to run one election, with 7 regions, reducing the cost and complexity dramatically.

    When the process was discussed with Roger Boutilier, NSAR CEO, he said that using Simply Voting was the simplest election process they had ever used at NSAR. It even increased member engagement in the Director election.

    This Fall, NSAR and other real estate associations across North America will run their annual elections using Simply Voting. Some of them may even use one of our Single Sign On integrations to make voting easier for their members. If you’re not one of them, contact us to learn more and have a voting solution designed for you.

    Milestone Achieved: 2014 Ontario Municipal Elections

    Posted on by Brian Lack

    Simply Voting delivered official results last week to four municipalities after providing them with internet and telephone voting for the 2014 Ontario municipal elections.

    While these were not the largest or most complicated elections we’ve tackled, they are our first public, binding elections and therefore an important milestone that reinforces Simply Voting’s corporate profile. Especially considering that, to quote the Chief Administrative Officer of Deep River “the election went as smooth as silk“.

    A total of 25,689 eligible voters from Central Huron, Huron East, Cavan Monaghan and Deep River were able to cast ballots using any phone or web-enabled device. Each town also operated a Help Centre where voters could receive assistance and vote at a tablet or computer kiosk. Voting continued for two weeks and participation rates were similar to or higher than the previous election. Deep River in particular saw 21% more votes cast.

    Online voting performed flawlessly. “This was Central Huron’s first experience using internet and telephone voting, and the electronic voting system provided by Simply Voting was user friendly, worked exactly as promised, was well received by the electors and saved us many hours of manpower. The professionalism of this company was evident in their product and their excellent training and support services.” said Janisse Zimmerman, Clerk’s Assistant at Central Huron.

    Read the press release.