Organizing & managing events in less time and with fewer resources
University elections and voting events often require significant resources and complex logistics. With a secure online voting system in place, however, the planning process is streamlined for efficiency, meaning your events are less time-consuming and require fewer personnel resources. Additionally, holding online voting events can help your university reach sustainability goals by limiting your reliance on paper. Let’s take a closer look:
Streamlining Events
With a variety of elections for different university groups, separate voting populations, and key data-gathering surveys distributed every year, universities require efficient and flexible voting processes. That said, scheduling events at optimal times, creating ballots with different voting systems and options, and ensuring that all eligible voters know when and where to cast their votes can all be logistically quite complex. Add on top of this the need to tally all the ballots cast and report the final results within a reasonable amount of time, and it’s easy to see how even the simplest of voting events or elections can be a headache.
Implementing a secure online voting solution can help eliminate this complexity. With online voting, setting up your event is as easy as filling out a form with your ballot options, and selecting the voting group that is eligible to vote, such as students, faculty, staff, or a mix. All voters will be notified ahead of time with the election information and the secure credentials they need to access the voting portal (which can easily be integrated with your university’s SAML authentication system).
As voters can cast their ballots from any device connected to the internet, no matter where they are, they can always find a convenient time to vote. Furthermore, elections can easily be held in a matter of a few days as there is no need to await the delivery of postal ballots from abroad or off-campus voters.
When the election is over, results are tabulated instantly in a few simple clicks. Better yet, an online voting system makes it easy and simple to duplicate an election year after year, so you never have to start from scratch again!
Minimizing Resource Needs
In addition to being potentially time-consuming endeavors, university elections and voting events can also often require significant resources when it comes to personnel and staff. For in-person voting in campus-wide elections, voting locations may need to be staffed with poll workers to aid voters in the voting process and to monitor voting activity. There will also need to be workers who publicize the election to help encourage participation, and who can help in counting the ballots and tallying the final results when voting is over.
An online voting solution, on the other hand, eliminates the need for most in-person voting support. As voters receive notifications prior to the election with voting information, publicizing the event becomes more automated. Lastly, results are automatically tabulated, requiring just a few clicks from election organizers. You university’s IT and security department will also feel a weight lifted off their shoulder with the implementation of a completely secure online voting solution that protects your voter’s data and privacy from start to finish.
Finally, an online voting solution can help further your university’s sustainability
initiatives. Along with minimizing paper-use in elections and voting events, an online voting channel also reduces the need for ink and printing related resources.
In the end, your university’s success with online voting will come down to choosing a qualified provider, one with experience in modernizing elections and events of all kinds, and dedicated experts in online voting technology and cybersecurity.
