Election Structure

It’s important to consider the structure of the election before you start building the ballot and adding voters. If your election has a ballot that is segmented based on grade level, then you will need to create one election for each grade level.

For example, the most common election type for high schools is for student council representative. You most likely do not want students in the sophomore level voting for seniors, seniors voting for juniors, and so on. In this case, you would actually create four elections. One for each grade level:

• Freshman Student Council Representatives
• Sophomore Student Council Representatives
• Junior Student Council Representatives
• Senior Student Council Representatives

Even though this technically falls under a single election category of “Student Council Representatives’, you will still have four different ballots that are relevant to a specific grade level, resulting in four different elections. This makes it easier for you to manage the different ballots and list of students that are eligible to vote in the election.

In some elections you may have ballot questions that can be answered regardless of grade level. For example, let’s say we have 4 students of varying grade levels (Senior, Junior, Sophomore, Freshman). You may not want the Freshman student to be voting for the Senior class president and vice versa, but you do want the Freshman to have a say in the Freshman Class President and the School Presidents.

In the above example, you have three questions that all 4 voters can vote on (School President, Vice President, and Secretary) and 6 questions that are limited based on the grade level.

With Election Runner, every voter that is a added to an election is eligible to vote for every question on the ballot. To handle the above scenario you would have 5 elections and use our “election linking” feature. This would result in the following elections:

• School-wide Election (with the questions: President/Vice-President/Secretary)
• Senior Class Election
• Junior Class Election
• Sophomore Class Election
• Freshman Class Election

The School-wide election would include all voters, and the other elections would only have voters that are eligible to vote in the questions on that election’s ballot. Using the “election linking” feature, a Freshman could vote in the School-wide Election and after they submit their vote, they would be led to a screen that would prompt them to continue to the Freshman Class Election. This way, students do not have to log in more than once to vote for the different ballots. Learn more about how to accomplish this by reading the knowledge base article on “election linking” here.