Milestone Achieved: Five Million Votes Cast on ElectionBuddy.com

Five million votes.

The team that make ElectionBuddy happen can’t even believe that we’ve reached that “Five million votes!!!” mark. We are small, but we are mighty!

But, we aren’t the only small but mighty ones. To celebrate reaching five million votes cast in our ElectionBuddy community, we want to share a special story from Ontario, Canada.

In a town five million meters away…

(Okay, more like 3.5 million meters away, but we’ve got a theme to carry on here!)

In the city of Toronto, Ontario, an organization exists to promote the usage of ranked ballots in their municipal elections. They are the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto. But, why use a ranked ballot? Well, according to our friends at RaBIT, ranked ballots should be used because they:

• Eliminate vote splitting;
• Provide more choice for voters because they eliminate vote splitting;
• Discourage negative campaigning because a second-place ranking matters as much as a first-place ranking;
• Reduce strategic voting because you can indicate your feelings on all candidates; and
• Ensure majority support because you cannot win an election with a ranked ballot with 20% of the vote.

These are all great reasons to use a ranked ballot. So, to put ElectionBuddy’s ranked ballot to the test, RaBIT worked with a private K-12 school in Toronto. 

Students at WillowWood School got a chance to use ElectionBuddy to run their student council elections. How did the students like it? “The kids themselves said it was an easy, comfortable, uncomplicated way to run their elections…the kids felt their votes counted and that, no matter who won, that they still had a stake in the outcome.” When teachers would come around to see if the students needed assistance with voting, most of them had already voted. That’s amazing!

Thank you to the students at WillowWood School for putting ElectionBuddy to the test, and thank you to the team at RaBIT for your passion about voting and for all of the kind words about ElectionBuddy. As RaBIT says, “Ranked ballots? ‘There’s an app for that’”!

Five million thumbs up!

To learn more about the WillowWood School experience, please see RaBIT’s blog post on the project.

Check out this great video that RaBIT made! It includes interviews with the students and teachers — see for yourself how much WillowWood School liked ElectionBuddy!

Put ElectionBuddy’s ranked ballot to the test for yourself today!