How to Avoid Online Voting Bias

Online voting has been revolutionary for many elections, increasing participation and security, reducing administrative workloads, and speeding up tabulation. However, voters in online elections can still be influenced both intentionally and unintentionally.

Quality online voting systems help administrators make sure they’re doing everything they can to prevent bias in their elections, but it’s important to understand where the risks of this bias lie. Avoiding online voting bias requires an intersection of neutral communication, equal voter access, and careful ballot design.

Where Bias Can Appear in Online Voting

Many people are familiar with direct election influence where voters are pressured to vote a certain way. Bias can also be unintentional, however. In these cases, it’s introduced through an accumulation of small design choices.

Bias can be introduced during online elections through:

• The order in which candidates or measures appear
• The way ballot instructions are written
• The way candidates and measures are described on the ballot

Bias can be introduced before online elections when:

• Coverage of candidates and measures is unequal, for example blog articles where one candidate is featured and their opponent is not or where candidate profiles on the ballot or on an association website are not of equal character length or where one is written professionally and another is not all can make for unequal exposure.
• Requirements and deadlines are not consistently communicated and so voters are confused or may miss seeing an important announcement due to their work shift schedules
• Not all members have the same access to the election where some voters live closer to voting location if the vote requires in-person voting.

These small factors can add up to having serious impacts on outcomes. Every adjustment administrators can make to avoid them helps prevent bias and secure a representative election.

Common Sources of Online Voting Bias and How to Prevent Them

Voter Access

One of the benefits of online voting is increased access, but administrators need to make sure this access is granted equally across members.

Questions administrators should ask include:

• Do all members have reliable Internet access?
• If members don’t have Internet access, are paper ballots equally easy to submit?
• Are online ballots equally available and navigable on both mobile and desktop?
• Is all election communication, such as deadline reminders and voting instruction, shared with members equally?

Introducing electronic voting can expand voter participation, but it can also introduce hurdles to some voters. Administrators need to be careful to make sure this doesn’t create a bias for or against part of their member base.

Ballot Design

The nature of ballot design might not have occurred to election administrators or leaders of member-based organizations as something important, but it is. Ballots must be consistent and neutral so that they don’t subtly influence voters in their decisions or give unfair advantage to certain outcomes.

Neutral ballots must:

• Present information in a consistent format, such as alphabetical order
• Offer equal information on options, such as using the same number of words in the descriptions of opposing measures
• Provide clear instructions so there is no voter confusion
• Ensure that if multiple languages are supported, every aspect of each ballot and voting instruction is identical

When evaluating online voting vendor options, organizations should  make sure to  take ballot design and presentation  into consideration and provide neutral design ballots.

Help Avoiding Bias

There are many steps organizations can take to reduce bias in online voting. One of the easiest steps to take is seeking the help of experts.

ElectionBuddy provides a platform designed to assist administrators in conducting fair elections, offering tools to help distribute carefully designed, neutral ballots and tabulate results quickly. To see more of our insights into election design, check out our latest post on anonymous versus public group polls!