Nomination Voting can be utilized to transparently select the most suitable candidates or options and encourage voter participation.
Voting Process
Announcements are run before a vote, as they are meant to announce the upcoming vote to your voters and capture nominations. Instead of voters choosing between pre-listed candidates, they are given spaces for writing in nominations or alternatively can be set up to select from a drop-down list. The number of spaces for nominations is determined by the administrator during setup. Otherwise, announcements are set up and run very similarly to a vote.
Write-in
You can either allow voters to add any name or choice for the write-ins or limit the write-ins to the candidates or options on a list created by you. To do this, you will need to select "Edit Write-in"
When selecting "Edit Write-in" and updating the setting to the below, voters select their write-in from people on the voter list who are identified as candidates.
There is also an option to "Show nominees to voters". When enabled, it will show the nominations that have been received during the vote on the ballot so future voters can see them, and select them if they wish.
"Add any name or choice for write-ins"
If you allow voters to Add any name or choice for write-ins, the ballot will look like this:
"Limit write-ins to voters on the voter list"
If you limit write-ins to voters on the voter list, the ballot will look like this:
"Show nominees to voters"
This is an example of how the ballot would appear for the next voters if a nomination had been submitted by a previous voter.
How to collect Text/Photo/PDF for Nominated Candidates
ElectionBuddy allows administrators to collect information from nominated candidates to become their Candidate Profiles. You can choose to collect Text, Photos, and/or a PDF
To enable the ability to collect information, select which types of information you’d like to collect from Nominated Candidates on the Ballot Question, beside “Collect”.
You can customize the Help Text to guide your voters on what information to submit.
How do voters add information to a candidate:
When entering their nomination, voters select “Add Information” to include add information for the candidate.
The “Add Information” modal will pop up where voters can add text information and upload an image and/or a PDF. Please see this article for more tips on uploading Candidate Profiles and Photos.
If the Nomination vote was being held to collect candidates for an upcoming Election, once the nomination vote is completed, you can re-use the question in the next setup and it will automatically populate the Candidate Profiles! Please see - Using a Prior Ballot Question.
How the Results are Calculated
All recorded nominations appear in the results. Any duplicate nominations are summed by ElectionBuddy, and the total number of times each candidate was nominated is displayed.
The nominations may also be consolidated in the event that a voter has nominated a candidate by a different name than others have nominated them by (for example, “Dave” and “David”). This is achieved by dragging and dropping a nomination toward the other nominations for that same candidate. ElectionBuddy will link the nominations and re-tally the nomination for that candidate to reflect the new total.
See Voting Systems and Calculating Winners to read about other voting and tally methods.
For any additional questions, please send us a chat using our Buddy Messenger in the bottom right of the screen