RCV123 is a tool — like a calculator or spreadsheet — for running your own ranked choice elections and polls.
Some people want to run an election, others want to do a poll. It is all the same to RCV123.
To get click on Set up ballot and follow the on-sreen prompts.
Setting up a ballot is as easy as 123! Just follow these steps:
Best practices summary:
We’ve discovered there are a surprising number of voting situations, so RCV123 has several ways to let you ensure that only the right people can vote in your elections.
If your election results are important, start by picking a trusted member of your group to be the Election Administrator. This person will create the ballots, select voting policies, distribute the ballot links or codes and announce the final results.
The majority of elections created on RCV123 are ballots that allow anyone to vote without verification. That method is most appropriate for small, high-trust groups, or casual polls or decisions. These are the easiest to set up and a voter can simply click a link or scan a QR code (which is the same for every voter) to start filling in their ballot.
For more formal situations, we recommend using one of our voter verification methods. The simplest option for voters is unique voting links. Alternatively, each voter can be given a unique short code that they enter to vote. These verification methods require the Election Administrator to provide each voter with their unique link or code. (See Distributing ballots for more information.) If you know the email addresses of all of your voters, you can use email verification. Voters will verify their address by entering a numeric verification code that is emailed to them.
For in-person verified voting, we recommend using voting codes. The codes can be distributed on paper and you can display or print the ballot link as a QR code. You can paste the codes into a document, add spacing, print them out and cut them up.
We hope you find RCV123 useful. We are contacted frequently by users who ask for election process design additions or changes, and we have made quite a few of them. We hope you can find a way that works for your poll or election. If not, please let us know.
We strongly recommend you set up small test ballots and obtain a few votes on whatever types of devices and in whatever type of situations the vote will be conducted — in person or remote, on phones, on shared computers, on individual laptops, or on a K-12 school or college email system. RCV123 is a free service, so there’s no reason not to set up as many test ballots as you want and give them a try. You should delete the test ballots after your tests are complete so that you don’t confuse them with actual ballots.
RCV123 strongly recommends using an account. An account allows you to use all of RCV123’s features and manage your ballots from your Dashboard. If your create an Election when you are not logged-in, you will be prompted to log in or create a free account so that you can track your ballots.
If you don’t want to use an account, you can only create simple open elections where anyone with the link can vote. If you lose the links to your ballot or your results, you cannot recover them.
If you choose “Restrict who votes” you have multiple options for ensuring only your intended voters can vote.
RCV123 does not harvest or sell these uploaded email addresses or use them in any way other than to do this verification. We are a non-profit for RCV education. All email addresses associated with a ballot are deleted when the ballot is deleted.
In the latter three cases, every voter will use the same ballot url. They then enter their voter code or email address, to acess the ballot. With a voter code, voters do not need to provide their email address or access their inbox to vote. With email verification, they need to do both.
Choosing “Anyone with the link can vote” does not verify voters in any way and it is possible for voters to vote multiple times. It’s best for high-trust groups or when the results of the election does not matter (it’s for demonstration or voter education). You have the option of enabling duplicate vote deterrence which uses a browser-based “fingerprint” to detect cases where a person attempts to cast more than one vote. It is not designed to block dedicated hackers but it will deter casual attempts to cast multiple votes. If you are planning to have people vote on shared devices (like kiosks) or your vote is purely for demonstration, then you should turn this option off.
If you choose to allow anyone with the link to vote, you can optionally ask users to enter their names so you can track who votes. This is most useful with a small group where you can click on the link in the Votes cast column of your Dashboard to see the names entered by people who have voted.
The name field is limited to twenty-five characters which allows most voters to enter their full name.
It is a violation of our terms and conditions to ask users to enter any confidential information in the name field, including but not limited to passwords, PINs, social security numbers, credit card numbers, or anything else that might be abused.
Most ballots have just one contest, but you can have up to 10 contests on a single ballot. For example, you might have a ballot for your club election with contests for President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer.
If your ballot will have more than one contest, it will need s name distinct from the names of the contests. This is limited to 40 characters. If you have regular elections, you probably want to include a date of some kind, such as “2025 Book Club Officer Election”.
You can set your ballot to automatically open and close on specific dates and at specific times.
If you set an opening date, this allows you to distribute the links to your ballot in advance before you want people to start voting. If you don’t set an opening date, then as soon as people receive the ballot link (and their voter code if applicable), they can vote. A pre-set opening date must be within one month of when you set up your ballot.
If you set a closing date, the ballot will automatically stop allowing votes at the date and time you choose. Final results will be available immediately after the ballot is closed. If you don’t set a closing date, you may close it manually using your Dashboard. This is useful in the case when you don’t know in advance when people will be voting (for example, if you are voting during a meeting).
Ballots are automatically deleted after one year.
Results can be displayed as votes are cast (live results) or delayed until after the election is closed (delayed results). Live results are appropriate for informal surveys and contests where tracking the vote will encourage participation. Closed results are more appropriate for consequential contests such as electing the officers of an organization.
For live results, the vote counts may not be updated immediately as each vote is cast, in which case it will indicate how recently the results were updated. In both cases, when an election is closed, the vote counts will be promptly updated.
If you select to upload your own voter codes or email addresses of voters, then you can prepare this in a text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit) or a spreadsheet (like Excel or Google Sheets). The file should contain a single column with no header row. Each row contains a single voter code or a single email address. You can save the file as .txt, .csv, .tsv, or .xlsx.
Uploading voter codes: Your codes can be up to 16 alphanumeric characters or hyphens. Codes are not case sensitive (so ABC-123-XYZ is the same code as abc-123-xyz). They should be randomly generated so that they can’t be guessed (people’s initials or sequential numbers, for example, would be guessable). A primary use case for this feature is to run one ballot with RCV123 generating codes for you (which you would then distribute to your voters), and then running a second ballot where you upload the same codes (not needing to distribute new codes in this case).
Uploading email addresses: Email addresses are not case sensitive (so alice@EMAIL.CORP is the same as ALICE@email.corp). Do not include mailing lists in your list of email addresses. This would allow anyone on the list to vote and, since each address can only be used once, nobody else on the list would be able to vote.
By default, RCV123 prevents duplicate votes by using a browser-based “fingerprint” to detect cases where a person attempts to cast more than one vote. This is not designed to block dedicated hackers but it will deter casual attempts to cast multiple votes. If you are planning to have people vote on shared devices (like kiosks) or your vote is purely for demonstration, then you should turn this option off.
You can choose to present each voter with the candidates in a different random order. This can even out bias towards candidates that occur at the top of the ballot. You should also not choose this if you have yes/no contests on your ballot or the choices have a natural order such as dates. You should not do this if your procedure calls for candidates to be in a fixed order, such as alphabetical or you do your own random drawing to determine the order and then that order is to be used for all ballots.
If you choose this option, it applies to all contests on this ballot.
Each contest can have a name with up to 40 characters. In a single contest ballot, this will become the name of the entire ballot. For example, if you only question is "What is your favorite pizza topping?", this will become the name of the ballot. A multi-contest ballots will have a ballot name and each contest will have a contest name.
By default, every contest will have just one winner. This is great if you are electing a club president or choosing the next book your book club will read. However, in many cases it makes sense to have multiple winners, and you can have up to 20 winners in a single contest!
Ranked choice voting offers even greater benefits for elections in which there will multiple winners. For example, if you are electing a student body council with 5 members, and you have 12 candidates, set the Number of winners to 5 and the Number of candidates to 12. The top 5 candidates will be elected.
Multi-winner ballot contests may be as new to your voters as ranked choice voting. Imagine that your book club is selecting books to read for the next four months, with perhaps ten contenders. If you used single winner contests, then you’d be voting on a different set of books for each of those four months. How would you distribute the ten books among the four different contests? Whatever you do is going to bias the results of your vote. The solution is to use a multi-winner contest. All ten candidates would compete against each other and four winners would be selected. And you would know which book was selected first, second, third, and fourth. The same process works whether you’re selecting books or committee members.
The number of candidates in this contest (2 to 30, at least one more than the number of winners).
The number of rankings (1 to 20 but not more than the number of candidates). This is automatically set to the number of candidates or to 1 for contests with only two candidates, but you can change it. When there are a large number of candidates, some election administrators prefer to limit the number of rankings to make the ballot seem less overwhelming.
The names of your candidates are limited to 125 characters, although only the first 25 will appear directly on the ballot. Names longer than 25 characters are truncated with an ellipsis (...) and voters must hover over or tap on the ellipsis to see the full name.
Unless you have selected candidate randomization, the candidates will appear on ballots in the order you enter them.
If you use your account to create a ballot, it will show up on your Dashboard. From there, you can access your voting links, see how many votes have been cast, close a ballot, or delete it when you are done with it.
From your Dashboard, click on a link in the Ballot links column to see links and codes that you can send to voters and QR codes that you can display or print.
If you choose to use voting links, those are best distributed by email. For a small number of voters, you can feasibly copy and paste unique voting links into individual emails. For a large number of voters, it’s better to use mail merge, perhaps using Microsoft 365 mail mergeor your own contact management software to automate this process. If you work for a larger organization, your IT department may be able to assist with distribution of the links.
If you use voter codes, in addition to the above options, since the voter codes are short, you also have the option of distributing the codes on paper at in-person meetings. The ballot link can be distributed by using a QR code or by using a URL shortener.
If you use email verification, then the only thing that voters need is the ballot link and that’s the same for everyone.
We realize this is a bit of work, but mass emails from the unfamiliar email address of a voting service are likely to wind up in spam folders. The best way for you to deliver ballots to your voters is to send emails from addresses that are already in use for two-way communication between your group and its members.
From your Dashboard, click on a link in the Votes cast column to see a record of every vote on each contest on the ballot, along with the voter’s voter code or name. The purpose of this is to let you track and manage who votes
In rare circumstances, you may need to reject ballots that you, as the Election Administrator, know to be invalid. For example, if you are requiring voters to enter their name, you may see a name that you do not recognize, or the name of someone who was not eligible to vote.
All cast votes initially show (Accepted). If you expect that a vote is invalid, you could mark that vote with (Not counted / To be decided) or (Rejected). When an election is closed, only votes marked with a checkmark will be counted in the final tabulation.
When voters are asked for their names, the name field is limited to twenty-five characters and the names are not verified in any way. This allows most voters to enter their full name.
If you create a ballot where anyone with the link can vote, RCV123 does not know the identify of the user voting. Likewise, if you use voting links or codes, RCV123 does not know which voter was given which link or code. If you choose email verification, then RCV123 could theoretically correlate a voter’s email address with their ballot using meta information but has no features designed to do that correlation. Furthermore, while RCV123 does allow Election Administrators to access raw ballot data, the data is de-identified.