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OpaVote Security Practices
Some OpaVote customers are nervous about the security of online elections. To reduce risk, OpaVote follows many security best practices, and in this post we explain some of them to reassure you that...
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2017 Year in Review
Happy New Year from OpaVote! We are based in the Boston area, which means that winter has arrived and our local yeti is roaming the streets! I don't know if he supports ranked-choice voting, but I'll...
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Efficient Manual Entry of Ranked Ballots
Some OpaVote customers hold an election using paper ballots and need to enter the ballots into the OpaVote website. We provide a ballot editor (pictured here) to make it easy to do this, and in this...
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Weighted Votes with Ranked-Choice Voting
For some online elections, it is desired to use weighted votes. In government elections, the vote of each voter counts the same so that each voter has equal influence. In this situation, you could say...
View ArticleUpdated OpaVote pricing
We've recently revised how we do pricing of elections, and we think it will be a welcome change for you. Previously, the price of your election depended on how long it lasted. The first week was free,...
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Trusting your Election Manager
Illustration via Max Fleishman Because of the importance of some elections, the thought of running elections online can create apprehension. Often, the concern is hackers who might try to manipulate...
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Elections with Sub-Groups of Voters
Some customers have subgroups of voters in their OpaVote online elections. For example, the subgroups could be based on where voters live (e.g., as in the congressional districts shown here) or the...
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Which elections have the largest turnout?
For an election manager, one of the hardest parts of running an election is getting the voters to actually vote! We have a previous blog post that gives some advice for increasing election turnout,...
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Non-Anonymous or Recorded Voting Now Available
For most elections, the anonymity of the vote is extremely important, and OpaVote makes sure that no one (not even us!) can figure out how a voter votes. For some elections, however, it is required...
View ArticleNo Longer Allowing PayPal Payments
For many years, we've allowed customers to make payments to OpaVote using a credit card via Stripe or via PayPal. Because PayPal is such a difficult company to work with, we've decided to stop...
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Above the Line (ATL) Voting with OpaVote
Some single transferable vote (STV) elections use what is called above-the-line (ATL) voting or a group voting ticket. ATL voting is most common in Australia where STV elections sometimes have a large...
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Customer Spotlight: Impact 100 uses OpaVote to award grants to nonprofits.
In this blog post, we highlight the great work of Impact 100 of Northwest Florida, and describe how they used OpaVote to allow voting at their meeting both on smart phones and using election kiosks....
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Easier payments with OpaVote
A few months ago, we stopped PayPal support to make it easier to make payments to OpaVote for your online elections. We are happy to now announce those improvements! We process our payments using a...
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Largest Election Ever with 57,000 Voters
Our largest election ever was completed yesterday with a total of 57,000 voters. Although we've carefully designed our online voting platform to scale to handle elections of any size, we must admit...
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Why I'm against lowering the voting age to less than 18
It is quite rare for me to be against any kind of voting reform. After all, I started OpaVote for the primary purpose of promoting ranked-choice voting. But when it comes to the supposed reform of...
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Elections with a Large Number of Candidates
Some online elections at OpaVote have a very large number of candidates. We'll sometimes see a single contest with hundreds of candidates or many contests where each contest has a large number of...
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Weighted code voters now available
At OpaVote online voting, we already had code voters and weighted voters, but now we have weighted code voters! This feature will be especially useful for HOA and condo elections where a voter's...
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Elections where a winning candidate withdraws
Online elections don't always go according to plan... For example, during an election, it is possible that a candidate may decide that she is no longer able or no longer willing to assume the duties of...
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Why we don't support equal rankings in RCV elections
OpaVote specializes in online elections with ranked-choice voting. With ranked-choice voting, you can select your first choice, your second choice, and so forth. You could imagine that a voter might...
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Duration of elections and polls now resets when you start voting
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Three Most Common Voter Requests and How to Deal with Them
For an election manager, running an online election, especially one with a lot of voters, can be a lot of work! In this blog post, we address the three most common voter requests, and how to handle...
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Running Elections through Zoom
With the current unfortunate situation, most in-person meetings need to be cancelled. Organizations are still meeting up, but using services like Zoom to conduct their meetings. Where you previously...
View ArticleOpaVote is Under New Management
OpaVote has been trusted by organizations around the world for easy, reliable and affordable voting for decades. In late 2023, OpaVote’s founder, Jeff, began looking for someone to take over...
View ArticleOpaVote’s 2024 HECVAT Lite Assessment Now Available
OpaVote is trusted by many higher-education institutions to run elections and polls -- from board, senate, and committee elections to approval of resolutions and rules changes.As part of our commitment...
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