Online polls and e-voting app for societies
Ballots that enforce eligibility from the member register, keep the vote secret from the committee running it, and produce a trail that can be verified afterwards without revealing who voted how.
Society e-voting runs secret-ballot elections and resolutions with one vote per flat enforced from the member register, live tallies, and an auditable trail that verifies the count without revealing individual votes. Proxy and offline votes are recorded alongside electronic ones.
Decisions with turnout, not just the vocal few
Turnout at a typical society general body meeting is low — often well under a third of members, and concentrated among retired residents and the committee’s own circle. Decisions with real financial consequences get taken by a small, unrepresentative fraction of the people who will pay for them, and a rate rise passed by a few dozen members of several hundred is contested for years.
The cause is mostly logistical. A working member cannot attend a Sunday morning meeting; a member who is travelling cannot vote at all; a member who owns a flat and lives elsewhere effectively never participates. None of this reflects apathy so much as a voting method that requires physical presence at a specific hour.
Will an e-vote result hold up if someone challenges it?
Electronic voting raises turnout substantially because it removes the need to be in the hall — but it introduces its own risks, and a society that adopts it carelessly will find its first contested election challenged.
Two questions decide whether a result stands. The first is whether the method is permitted at all: that depends on your state’s Act, your registered bye-laws, and in some states Registrar circulars. Several states expressly permit electronic voting; others are silent. Check before relying on it for an election, and treat the software as recording the vote rather than as authorising the method.
The second is whether the ballot itself was sound. Three properties have to hold: the vote was secret, only eligible members voted and each only once, and the count can be verified afterwards. The committee running the vote must not be able to see how anyone voted.
Proxy and offline vote handling
A society cannot disenfranchise members who lack a smartphone, and any e-voting deployment that does not have a working paper path is one we would advise against running. Paper ballots are entered by the scrutineer with the physical ballot retained, and proxies, where the bye-laws permit them, are recorded against the member represented.
The combined tally shows electronic and offline votes separately as well as together, so nobody can later argue that one channel swamped the other unseen.
Secret ballot, one vote per flat
Secrecy and eligibility are where contested results usually come apart.
Secret ballot e-voting
Votes are separated from voter identity at the point of casting. The system records that a member voted — necessary to prevent double voting and to compute turnout — and separately records the vote, with no link between them available to anyone, including the society and including us.
This is the property that matters most in a small community where people have to live alongside each other afterwards. A committee that can see how a member voted on a contentious resolution is a committee some members will not vote against.
One-vote-per-flat enforcement
Eligibility comes from the member register: one vote per unit, cast by the member of record or by whoever the joint holders have nominated. A flat with three joint owners does not get three votes, and a member in arrears is included or excluded strictly according to what the bye-laws say.
Getting the eligible voter list right is where election disputes usually originate. Because the roll is generated from the register rather than typed up before the vote — and the register is kept current through ownership changes, joint holdings and nominations — it reflects who actually holds each unit.
Live, tamper-proof results
The tally is computed continuously and sealed at close. Interim results are visible only to the returning officer or scrutineer role, not to candidates or the committee, because publishing a running tally during an open ballot influences the remaining votes.
After the ballot closes: an auditable voting trail
Once the ballot closes the result publishes with the count, the turnout and the eligible roll size, so members can see the mandate as well as the outcome.
Each vote is recorded with a verification code the voter keeps. A member can confirm their own vote was included in the final count without revealing it to anyone, and a scrutineer can verify that the number of votes counted matches the number cast. That combination — individually verifiable, collectively countable, and secret — is what allows a result to survive a challenge from a losing candidate.
A resolution carried electronically is then recorded against its meeting with the count, so an approved levy becomes a billing change traceable back to the vote that authorised it.
Quick polls and surveys, kept apart from resolutions
Not every question is a resolution. Non-binding polls — preferences on clubhouse timings, which of three vendors residents prefer, whether to hold the AGM on a weekday evening — take a few minutes to run and give a committee a sense of the room before it commits.
Polls are clearly marked as non-binding so nobody later mistakes one for a resolution of the general body, which is a genuine confusion where both live in the same app.