Ready to dive into the details? Here are some questions we've been asked about using RCV123.
You should first decide what “success” means for your election. RCV123 is a tool — like a calculator or a spreadsheet — for making RCV polls, elections, or group decisions, and offers a multiple verification methods.
There can be tradeoffs between ease of use and the level of voter verification achieved. Voters in casual polls may not want to take the time to use any voluntary verification steps. Alternatively, if you’re holding a vote for an important group office, an overly casual voting method permits motivated participants to cast multiple votes across multiple devices or locations, which would probably not be a successful outcome. If you trust your voters to not push any boundaries and will vote once — a quick, casual voting method can sometimes work well no matter how high or low the stakes.
So it’s crucial your group look at the level of trust you have in your set of voters, the amount of time and effort they are willing to spend on participating, together with the stakes of the decision, and then choose a voting method that best matches the situation.
The simplest secure method of voting is where you ask RCV123 to generate voting links for you and then you email each voter one of the links. Voters just need to click to see their ballot. Each link can only be used to vote once. If you’re voting at an in-person meeting, you can ask RCV123 to generate short unique alphanumeric codes and distribute those on paper. Voters then enter the url of the ballot (or scan a QR code) and enter the code.
RCV123 does not distribute election links or ballots to voters. That is a task the group sponsoring the election must do — and can do better — themselves.
Emails from voting services can get caught in spam folders. So RCV123 believes the best way to get emailed election ballots to voters is if they are sent directly from the group or person sponsoring the vote, and from an address that has already been used to communicate successfully.
Voting links can be distributed in many other ways besides email: you can embed an RV123 ballot into any website. (We provide links for that when each ballot is created.) Groups can also distribute ballot links by social media, text, Slack, etc. For in-person votes, groups can hand out short alphanumeric code, and users can scan a QR code on their phones or laptops to access the ballot.
An Election Administrator is the person who sets up an online election. They are also responsible for sending out election links to others, and can have the ability to make election management decisions through their Dashboard.
RCV123 is an open platform. We do not screen administrators or any information they claim about themselves or the groups they may represent. They are not employees or affiliated with RCV123 in any way.
The administrator running any election is an important role that requires a trustworthy person implementing clear policies that the group has agreed to in advance.
While logged into your free account, the Dashboard is available on the navigation bar. The Dashboard shows a list of all the elections that have been set up using your account and allows them to be managed. You can access the voting links for each ballot, see how many votes have been cast and see election results. You can also close or open voting and delete any election that you no longer need.
On the Dashboard, click on a link in the Votes cast column to see a special page that shows the date and time that each vote was cast. If you are using voter verification, the page will also show the information the voter used to verify themselves, such as their name, voter code or email address.
The Election Administrator can use the Votes cast page to individually accept or reject each vote. This ability is why it’s crucial for any group holding an election to wisely choose an administrator and implement a transparent process so other group members can be comfortable with any decisions made.
The contents of a specific ballot is never identified with a specific voter to the Election Administrator or any other participant. The Votes cast page only shows ballots that were cast and not the votes on those ballots.
Ballots are stored in the RCV123 database and RCV123 staff can, if necessary to support the operation of the service, access the contents of the database. Under normal conditions, RCV123 staff would never access any individual ballot. Furthermore, unless you use the email address verification method, RCV123 has no way to know which voter code or link was distributed to which voter. RCV123 uses security measures to ensure unauthorized users cannot intercept ballots or access the database.
Voter codes are a mechanism to ensure that only authorized users can cast a ballot. Either RCV123 generates the codes or the Election Administrator can upload the codes and the voter must enter a code before they can access the ballot. The codes need to be distributed in advance of the vote.
Voter codes are alphanumeric strings (A-Z plus dash) of up to 16 characters. Generated codes are provided in all uppercase but are not case sensitive when entered.
A convenience of voter codes is that the same codes can be used for multiple ballots. The Election administrator just uploads the same codes to multiple ballots. Alternatively, if the links are distributed by email, links are more convenient for voters to just click and vote.
If a voter is concerned that the name they entered might not be recognized by their administrator, they should contact them to make sure the vote will be included.
While we use standard HTTPS encryption and password hashing, and a robust same-device duplicate deterrence system, RCV123 is not a secure voting system that a user can rely on independent of how the Election Administrator and voters use it.
RCV123 systems are for educational purposes only to teach about ranked choice voting. Think of our role as the same as a calculator or a spreadsheet. RCV123 systems are just tools for groups to use as they design and operate their own elections under policies and processes they mutually create, agree to, and implement.
RCV123 is not allowed to be used for any election directly for a government office.
No. Our systems are not designed for that purpose, do not offer the necessary security, and use for governmental elections is a violation of our terms and conditions.
Voting machines approved for use in government-run elections are highly specialized, highly regulated devices that have gone through rigorous and legally mandated certification processes to ensure they are secure from being misused or compromised electronically or physically. States and localities make major investments in selecting, purchasing, certifying, maintaining, and using their voting equipment.
RCV123 systems are for non-governmental elections only. RCV123 has not gone through any certification process and is not designed or authorized for governmental election use, or any election that requires certified election administration.
Also, governmental elections have systems in place to verify voter identities with a jurisdiction’s database of registered voters. They also have legally mandated methods of distributing and collecting ballots that ensure that only registered voters receive a ballot and only registered voters can cast a ballot. RCV123 does not comply with those requirements and does not have the ability to check identities against any election database.
The integrity of an election depends on security of the ballot distribution, which is the responsibility of the Election Administrator. We are for private, community, and school groups to run their own internal elections quickly and easily and to their own standards of voter information and participation.
Private organizations — including local political parties — can use RCV123 to decide on internal leaders or even nominate candidates to represent them in official elections, understanding that they are responsible for setting up a ballot distribution system and other election-management systems to ensure the integrity of the election and get results they can agree to respect. We hope they find our systems to be useful tools for these purposes
We welcome this use in limited situations by private organizations and local, private political parties because it will educate local leaders about RCV — which is a major part of our mission.
RCV123 uses the common ranked choice voting method of counting the first place votes, then eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes and reallocating those votes to the candidates ranked second on those ballots. This process repeats until one candidate exceeds 50%.
For more detail, including how multi-winner elections are counted, see our Vote counting explainer.
The common method for handling ties in RCV is random choice. Our mission is to educate people about RCV which includes providing this service and making it useful even for small elections. And ties are much more common in small elections.
For that reason, if an election would require a random choice, RCV123 uses a mathematical tiebreaker using a weighted sum of all of the votes for a candidate. If the two lowest ranked candidates have the same tiebreaker score, then random choice is used. We believe this system will produce more satisfactory results than simply using random choice.
For more detail, see our Tiebreaking explainer.
Please check spam, promotions or social inbox folders. RCV123 normally sends email verification codes just a few seconds after a request comes in. If your code does show up in a different folder, it’s helpful to move it to your inbox, as that will make it more likely it will show up directly in your inbox next time and will also help other voters. If it’s in spam, click the “not spam” button and if it’s in another folder, drag and drop it into your inbox. If prompted whether to do this for all future mail from this sender, click yes.
Different email services or programs place verification emails from RCV123 in different places. As all of these emails are requested by an individual voter and they know to look for and open them right away, these email services should learn to place them in primary folders. Some email services allow users to instruct that specific senders have their emails sent to a certain folder.
The Election Administrator must upload a text or CSV (comma separated) text file. You can create this in Excel or a text editor. (MacOS provides a text editor called TextEdit while Windows provides Notepad.) Since the file will contain only one column it actually won’t contain any commas.
chocolate@example.com vanilla@email.home straw.berry@dunder-mifflin.corp
Yes. When setting up an election, look for the selection of the "number of ranks." If that is set to 1, your election will be the same as a simple, standard, plurality election. If you decide to use RCV123 in this way, we recommend that you clearly inform participants about that election policy — as you will be depriving your group of the consensus outcomes that RCV offers.
If there are only two choices in an election, RCV123 defaults to a plurality election.
Send email to info@rcv123.org.