Yes, you can … but before we tell you your options, we would like an opportunity to try to talk you out of it.
Consider not having paper ballots after all ...
We have been in the business of help non-profit associations with elections and surveys for well over a dozen years. In that time, we have had a number of customers want to move to online voting while continuing to offer paper ballots. With no exceptions, as soon as online voting was an option, the vast majority of ballots were cast online, and so few paper ballots were cast that they were not material to the outcome. Every dollar (and minute of your time) spent preparing, mailing, receiving, and counting paper ballots, in our experience, generates a poor return on investment.
The reality is that almost anyone can vote online more easily than on paper. According to Pew Research (http://www.pewinternet.org), 77% of adults in the United States report owning a smartphone in the fall of 2016. Your voters can use a modern smartphone to vote in your polls – so voting online is very easy for most Americans. (The cited article provides similarly high percentages for several other countries.)
Are you concerned about your voters’ online access based on their demographics? You may want to take a look at these charts from Pew Research, which break down online use by age, gender, and other demographics. As an example, a Pew Research report in 2017 shows that 42% of seniors (age 65 and older) in the United States have a smartphone, but that 67% of them use the Internet.
However, if you wish to continue supporting paper ballots, you can.
What if a voter votes through BallotBox and on paper?
The key is that no voter be able to vote twice, so start by deciding whether a paper ballot will take precedence over an online one from the same voter, or whether an online ballot supersedes a paper one. In your poll instructions to your voters, you should explain which vote will be counted if someone votes in BallotBox and on paper.
If you want the online vote in BallotBox to take precedence:
- Do not unlock your online poll in BallotBox until after you have received all of the paper ballots you are going to count.
- Know which voter has cast each paper ballot. (Sometimes voters have similar names. The key is to know with certainty the BallotBox Voter ID of the person who cast the paper ballot. Usually, the Voter ID is the voter’s email address.) To protect the anonymity of the paper ballot, one options is to put each paper ballot in an envelope, and writing the voter’s identity on the outside of the envelope.
- When the online voting period ends, log into your Admin account in BallotBox, and go to the Voters tab within that poll.
- Using the search feature, find each voter who cast a paper ballot. If he or she also voted in BallotBox, discard his or her paper ballot.
- Once you’ve done that for all of the paper ballots, you are ready to unlock the online poll, count the paper ballots, and manually combine the online and offline results.
If you want the paper vote to take precedence:
- Do not unlock your online poll in BallotBox until after you have received all of the paper ballots you are going to count.
- Know which voter has cast each paper ballot. (Sometimes voters have similar names. The key is to know with certainty the BallotBox Voter ID of the person who cast the paper ballot. Usually, the Voter ID is the voter’s email address.) To protect the anonymity of the paper ballot, one options is to put each paper ballot in an envelope, and writing the voter’s identity on the outside of the envelope.
- When the online voting period ends, log into your Admin account in BallotBox, and go to the Voters tab within that poll.
- Using the search feature, find each voter who cast a paper ballot. If he or she also voted in BallotBox, discard his or her online ballot by clicking the Cancel Vote button. (If you click it by accident, the button will automatically change to Reinstate Vote, so that you can correct that mistake.)
- You will also be required to enter the reason why the online vote was canceled. This explanation will be emailed to that particular voter when the poll is unlocked, and will be visible to any Officer of that poll. For example, you could write, “Also voted on a paper ballot, which will be counted.”
- When the Officers unlock the poll, BallotBox will report on the unlock page how many online votes were canceled, so that if any Officer has a question about that, he may investigate before unlocking the poll.
- As soon as the poll is unlocked, each voter whose online vote was canceled will be sent an email from BallotBox explaining that the vote was canceled. The email will include the explanation you wrote as to why the vote was canceled.