Key Features

BallotBox is an easy, affordable Web-based voting solution designed specifically for voting on sensitive, contentious or business-critical issues.

Unlike online survey systems and other partial e-voting solutions, BallotBox delivers all the features essential for secure, private, reliable voting.

  • Authentication of each voter. Your organization's member list (or other voting groups, such as employees, retirees, etc.) is imported into BallotBox from your existing database. BallotBox randomly selects a password for each person in the group, and notifies the individual by email. The voters follow the links in the emails back to BallotBox, where they select their own passwords, which will be required for BallotBox voting.
  • Voter Anonymity. BallotBox encrypts all votes before storing them in the software's database. Our process ensures that no one - even Collaborare personnel with direct database access - can see how any particular person voted in a poll. Viewing results can only occur after the poll closes. Even then, a quorum of those individuals you designate as the "Poll Committee" must simultaneously provide their passwords to unlock the poll results.
  • Integrity of the Poll. BallotBox verifies checksums any time the results of a poll are viewed. If anyone were to try to change information in the database related to the poll, when poll results were requested, BallotBox software would recognize that checksums don't match. BallotBox would then notify you that the ballots have been compromised, and would not display the results.
  • Support for Paper Ballots. Some members of your organization may not have email access, or may not want to vote online. BallotBox is designed to support paper-based, off-line voting. To offer an off-line voting option, BallotBox notifies the poll administrator which members did not vote during the online voting period. You can then permit those individuals to vote using paper ballots. When the Poll Committee enters their passwords to unlock the online ballots, they will also enter, certify, and digitally sign the results of the paper ballots.
  • Vote Weighting. With Version 2, BallotBox now allows you to assign a number of votes to each voter. For example, a homeowner's association's rules may provide that a member with a higher assessed property value has more votes than a member with a lower assessed property value. You can still choose to have one vote per voter, but if your rules require some voters to have more votes than others, BallotBox will support you.
  • Email Bounce Reporting. New in October 2006! BallotBox now tracks email "bounce" messages indicating that a voter has not received BallotBox's invitation to vote. You can view these messages within BallotBox, or export them to a Microsoft® Excel® file, allowing you to follow up with your voters, clean up your email list, and improve all of your emailed communications — as well as your online voting participation.
  • voterSIGNUP Email Address Collection. With the add-on voterSIGNUP service, you can provide — by mail, or by in person delivery — a uniquely assigned code to each voter for whom you do not yet have an email address. Those voters would then use that code to give BallotBox their email addresses, to access BallotBox, and to vote online. At the same time, you can store the collected email addresses for future use.

Additional BallotBox features include:

  • Email reminders - As often as you want, send follow-up reminders, just to those who have not yet voted, to improve voter participation.
  • Conditional Ballot Pages - You can choose whether a voter sees certain portions of your ballot based on that voter's answers to previous questions in your ballot — taking a ballot that so long many voters will not respond, and reducing it to a manageable size that still gives you all of the information you need.
  • Segmenting Your Ballot By Voter Categories - New in September 2006! If you have different ways of categorizing your organization's voters, you can change what portions of the ballot each category of voters will see. For example, a statewide association can permit all of its voters to vote for the president, while only allowing the "District 1" voters to elect the director that will represent "District 1" on the association's board.
  • Discarding Online Ballots - New in September 2006! In response to customers' requests, now your voters can log into BallotBox to discard their own online ballots, so they can modify their ballots before the poll closes.
  • Cancelling Online Ballots - New in September 2006! Also in response to customer requests, you can now cancel an online ballot if a voter has not satisfied your voting conditions before the poll closes — without compromising the anonymity or integrity of the poll.
  • Random display - BallotBox randomly shuffles the order in which multiple-choice answers are displayed to each voter.
  • Write-in voting - Voters can write in a response or add a candidate.
  • Links to more information - Members can link to Web pages for more information on a topic, candidate bio's and position statements and other details.
  • Single database - BallotBox imports data from your existing database, eliminating the need to maintain user information in two files.
  • Hosted service - As a hosted service, we eliminate the hassle and expense for you to maintain servers and large IT staff. BallotBox is hosted on our secure server and voting data is processed in 128-bit encrypted format. Our e-ballots are branded with your logo and your site's graphics.