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.
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.
Electronic voting raises turnout substantially because it removes that requirement — but it introduces its own risks, and a society that adopts it carelessly will find its first contested election challenged. Secrecy, eligibility and verifiability all have to be right, and the committee running the vote must not be able to see how anyone voted.
- Presence-based voting excludes. Working members, travellers and absentee owners are structurally disenfranchised.
- Low turnout weakens mandates. A rate rise passed by fifty members of four hundred is contested for years.
- Careless e-voting gets challenged. Secrecy and eligibility have to hold up, or the result will not.
Key capabilities
Three capabilities make the vote fair, and three make it verifiable afterwards.
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 list is generated from the register rather than typed up before the vote, 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.
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.
Auditable voting trail
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.
Quick polls and surveys
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.
Proxy and offline vote handling
Members who cannot or will not vote electronically vote on paper, and those ballots are entered by the scrutineer with the physical ballot retained. Proxies, where the bye-laws permit them, are recorded against the member represented.
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. The combined tally shows electronic and offline votes separately as well as together.
How it works
The scrutineer role, not the committee, controls the ballot while it is open.
Who it helps
E-voting changes who participates, which is a bigger change than it first appears.
Works with the rest of KeyMatrix
The eligible voter roll is the member register, which is why it is right. Ownership changes, joint holdings and nominations are maintained as part of normal operations, so the roll for an election reflects who actually holds each unit rather than who held it when somebody last updated a list.
Results flow into the governance record. A resolution carried electronically is recorded against the meeting with its count, lands in the decision log, and generates its action items — so an approved levy becomes a billing change traceable back to the vote that authorised it.
- AGM and governance. Electronic and in-room tallies combine on the same resolution record.
- Unit management. The eligible roll is the member register, kept current continuously.
- Committee management. Carried resolutions land in the decision log with their counts.
- Communication. Ballot opening, reminders and results reach members on the channels they use.