Slate Voting and Choice Groups

Sort candidates into slates and choice groups to align policies, meet diversity quotas, and fulfill ballot requirements.

Group Candidates by Policy or Platform

A slate is a group of candidates running together for multiple positions, typically because they share a unified policy or vision. Simplify your ballot by grouping candidates into a slate. Instead of making voters select individuals for every single open position, slate voting allows them to support an entire team with one seamless selection.

Choice groups allow you to enforce specific selection rules to match your bylaws. For example, does your board require at least one junior member, or is there a specific diversity requirement that must be met? By setting up a choice group, you can build these exact rules directly into the voting process. The system seamlessly guides voters to meet your criteria before they can successfully cast their vote, ensuring every submitted ballot meets your rules.

Facilitate campaigns and simplify the voting experience. ElectionBuddy makes it easy for candidates who share a common vision to run as a team.

How you organize your candidates can shape the voting experience in a couple of helpful ways:

For Voters: Simplifies the ballot. With just one selection, voters can support a unified team and shared vision rather than researching every single candidate.
For Candidates: Empowers individuals with common goals to join forces and campaign as a united front.
For Administrators: Guarantees balanced representation. It ensures the elected group automatically meets the organization's specific demographic, geographic, or role-based bylaws.

Help Ensure Ballot Requirements Are Met

Moving your elections online eliminates the manual tally errors often associated with complex ballot rules when using Choice Groups.

For Voters: Removes the guesswork. Built-in prompts guide voters to meet all criteria, preventing frustrating submission errors.
For Administrators: Eliminates manual verification. The system automatically enforces your exact bylaws, such as diversity quotas or specific role requirements.
For the Organization: Guarantees 100% accuracy. With rules built directly into the voting flow, every submitted ballot is valid and compliant.

Flexible Slate Voting for Organizations of Every Size

ElectionBuddy’s slate voting enables organizations to simplify complex elections while supporting their compliance with voting rules, bylaws, and election requirements. Administrators can create ballots that are easy for every voter to understand for:

Elections for board members
Cooperative elections
Managing leadership contests across multiple chapters or committees

In many elections, candidates typically choose to campaign together on common visions or ideas. Rather than asking voters to select individual candidates separately, slate voting means a complete team can be presented to them as a single option.

This can be particularly valuable when the exact number of available positions is being filled by candidates who have decided to run together.

How Slate Voting Supports Different Election Processes

Each group, association, or committee might need to use different types of slates, depending on how their election processes work. For example:

A party slate might represent candidates with shared priorities.
A management-recommended slate could be presented alongside independently nominated candidates, where the governing documents allow.
A forward slate might highlight candidates who support a particular strategy.

Because election rules vary between jurisdictions and organizations, this enables administrators to configure ballots according to their own bylaws and policies, and any applicable law.

This approach removes the need for complex voters’ ballots. It also helps groups adhere to all the applicable rules, while improving participation by encouraging voter engagement, especially if there are numerous positions to fill or candidate groups for those with voting rights to consider.

Benefits of Slate Voting for Election Administrators

ElectionBuddy's slate voting feature works alongside the choice groups feature, supporting more sophisticated ballot configurations. This ensures slate voting remains an option even within elections where there are specific requirements in terms of candidate representation, such as a minimum number of member categories or geographic regions represented.

Choice groups help to guide voters through those required selections, with ballots that have been built around each organization’s governance structure, without relying on time-consuming manual verification checks after voting has closed.

These features are very well-suited to organizations that might need to manage recurring elections, such as:

Associations
Unions
Cooperatives
Nonprofits
Educational institutions
Corporations

In some labor organizations, for instance, ballots might include both slate-based and individual candidate contests, depending on which offices are being filled and how the organization's election procedures work.

How Purpose-Designed Voting Solutions Help With Efficient Election Processes

The flexibility built into ElectionBuddy goes beyond the ease of online voting, which breaks down many of the traditional barriers to voter participation. Organizations can manage multiple types of voting workflows from just one platform, including digital, online, paper, and mail-in ballots, based on their requirements.

Options range from self-service elections to fully managed processes with professional support, giving organizations the ability to choose whichever approach best fits within their timelines, budgets, and objectives.

By simplifying how the seats presented on a ballot are organized and supporting customizable election rules, ElectionBuddy helps organizations create more accessible voting experiences for administrators, candidates, and all of the voters who are involved in the election process!

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