Ballot
Every election has a single ballot that is comprised of one (or many) questions that voters can respond to. We use the term “question” as sometimes voters may be voting on a position (i.e. President, Vice President, etc.), a ballot measure (proposed rules, legislation, etc.), or maybe even responding to an actual question.
Each question can have a list of “options” that a voter can select from. This could be a candidate, yes/no, approve/deny, or even a write-in field for a text based response.
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Types of Questions
Election Runner currently offers two types of questions that you can select from: Multiple Choice, and Ranked Choice (IRV).
Multiple Choice
Multiple choice questions allow voters to select one (or many) options from a list of options. This is commonly referred to as “Plurality Voting” or “First Past the Post” where the option with the majority of the votes wins.
With the multiple choice question type you can configure a minimum and maximum number of options that a voter must select when voting. For example, let’s assume you need to fill the President position (the question) and have 4 candidates (the options), and you only want voters to select a single candidate. The maximum number of options a voter can select would be set to one. If voters are not required to provide a response to this question, then the minimum value would be set to zero. If a response is required, the minimum would be set to one.
These rules can be set on a question-by-question basis, which means you can have multiple questions with different minimum/maximum rules.
Ranked Choice (IRV)
Ranked choice questions allow voters to rank the list of options by preference from 1 to X. Where X is the total number of options associated with a given question. This method is commonly referred to as “Preferential Voting” or “Ranked Choice Voting” and uses Instant-Runoff Voting to determine a single winner. For more information, please see the knowledge base article: Ranked Choice / Instant Runoff Voting.