Application Scenario: Voting and election in city council meetings

Meeting Title: First session of the city council in Sieniawa in Poland

Participants & frequency: 15 participants, once a month

Meeting time: Nov. 22 of 2018

Challenges

City council or town council is the legislative body that governs a city, town, municipality, or local government area. Polish city councils generally consist of 15 to 25 elected councilors, who come together to consult, deliberate, or make decisions once a month. As very important government decision-making meeting, when it comes to resolution voting and candidate election, the vote outcome is what ultimately matters.

However, by traditional voting methods, such as show of hands voting and ballot paper voting, the efficiency of counting votes is so low that greatly affect the meeting process, since it always takes hours to manually collect the votes and compile the voting reports. It also cannot completely avoid votes losing or error during the manual counting process. And due to the voting results will only be available the next day, there is an opportunity to make changes on paper ballots and to occur votes tampering, which will affect the authenticity and accuracy of the voting results.

Besides, all members cannot view the voting details on the spot, the voting process is not enough open and transparent.

The city council in Sieniawa are looking for a right technology to help them release staffs from heavy burden of counting votes, make voting results more open and transparent, while cutting their meeting time in half.

Solution

In order to optimize the voting procedure and speed up votes collection, the city council in Sieniawa introduced into SunVote Electronic Voting System in 2018.  Since then, the efficiency of their meetings has made a qualitative leap.

1.  Before meeting, import council members’ list and edit agendas & motions according to your meeting procedure & voting rules by SunVote voting software.

“Our operator edits the confirmed agendas by the voting software in advance, and associates each voting keypad to the councilor by a unique ID. When councilors come into the meeting room, they’ll be distributed their associated voting keypad. In this means, we don’t need to print and hand out lots of paper ballots any more, therefore save time and energy using for voting preparation before the meeting”

1. During meeting, present councilors register easily by electronic “sign in” to quick check the quorum.

     “SunVote electronic voting system help councilors to do roll calls quickly and check the quorum easily. Our council members just need to press “sign in” button by their voting pad to confirm their presence. And quorum situation can be checked in 10s. This greatly shortens the sign-in process.

1. During meeting, councilors submit their votes with voting keypad, SunVote system automatically counts all votes and displays results in real time

“SunVote EVS system makes our voting more efficient and transparent. When the chairman display the resolution to vote, our councilors can immediately click the yes (√) or no (×) button on intuitive voting keypad and submit their votes. The votes are 100% collected within 10 seconds. In the past we usually need take hours to complete. The voting results on each motion can be displayed in real time and confirmed by our auditors and councilors, which providing clear view and complete transparency to our voting and election process.

In addition, during the voting process, each councilor can view the voting submitting and receiving status by their own voting keypad. And there is text prompt guiding the operation on the backlit screen, which ensure our councilor cast their votes without error.’’

4. After meeting, SunVote Electronic Voting System automatically generate intuitive and detailed reports for printing, auditing and archiving in regulate formats

“Our voting reports on each agenda as well as sign-in reports can be generated automatically in regulated format, which includes our usually used header, footer and watermark of our logo in the reports. We can export them directly without further editing and print out for auditing and archiving purpose. This greatly reduces manual statistics and save more than 50% labor cost.

User Comments

"Now I’d like to mention that we are really impressed by the work performed by SunVote. He is definitely the best! The whole voting system, as usual, worked fine, very easy to use, super-fast and accurate, giving us the pace of mind to work relaxed and sure to get a good result.”