The BallotBox is a web-based system for conducting elections and surveys. These are generically referred to as "Polls." BallotBox allows organizations such as chapters and districts to define ballots and questionnaires, register voters or participants for a Poll, conduct Polls, and generate summaries of the results.
This overview page is written to give Poll Registrars the information they need to create, conduct, report on the results of their Polls. Additional help pages provide more details on specific portions of the system, as discussed in the following sections.
If as a Registrar you have questions on or issues with using the system, please contact the Administrators by sending an email to support@ballotbox.digm.com.
The features and functions of BallotBox are organized around the following component entities:
The primary duty of a Registrar is to set up, manage, and operate Polls. This section describes the overall process and sequence of events required to do so.
The first step is to get authorized to be a Registrar. Only Administrators can perform that function. If the Administrators do not do so on their own initiative, you can click the "Contact Support" link at the top of this page to send a request to be authorized as a Registrar.
After an Administrator authorizes you as a Registrar, you will receive an email with a customized link. Clicking that link will allow you to access the BallotBox site as a Registrar and manage your Polls. You must store this link in a safe place, as it is your only way to access the site.
Please keep your Registrar link private. Anyone in possession of the link will have full access to create and modify your Polls and Voters. An Administrator can resend you the link if you lose it, and can generate a new link if your existing one becomes compromised.
When you enter your Registrar link in a web browser, the BallotBox site will respond with its home page, which displays a list of links that access various parts of the site. Each page on the site has a "Vote" icon in its upper-right corner. Click that icon on any BallotBox site page to get back to the home page.
Polls are private to a Registrar. Only the creating Registrar and system Administrators can see and modify your Poll data.
To access your Polls, click the Manage Polls link on the site's home page, which will display a list of your Polls. That list will be empty initially. Click the New Poll button at the bottom of the list to create a new Poll. Click the Title cell for an existing poll to view and modify its details.
Voters and the construction of emails to send to voters are accessed from the within the Poll details. See the Managing Polls page for more information on creating and updating Polls.
Each Poll must be associated with a QuestionSet. As discussed above, QuestionSets define the questions that will appear on a Ballot and the choices a Voter can select in response to each question.
Clicking the Manage QuestionSets link on the site's home page will display a list of all QuestionSets to which you have access. That list will include the QuestionSets you have created, plus all of the "shared" QuestionSets that are available to all Registrars. Only Administrators can create and modify shared QuestionSets, but you can assign shared QuestionSets to your Polls in order to use them. You can also clone (make a copy of) a shared QuestionSet as a private QuestionSet and then make any changes to that cloned copy you wish.
To allow QuestionSets to be shared among multiple Polls, QuestionSets are not embedded within a Poll but instead are referenced by a Poll. You establish the association of a Poll with a QuestionSet as part of Poll maintenance. You can either create the Poll first or its QuestionSet first, but you will not be able to open the Poll for voting until a QuestionSet has been assigned to the Poll.
See the Managing QuestionSets page for more information on creating and updating QuestionSets.
Once you have a Poll defined, you can register voters for that Poll. You manage Voters by clicking the Manage Voters button on a Poll's main panel. This opens a separate window or tab in your browser that lists the Voters currently registered for the Poll and allows you to create and modify Voters for the Poll.
There are two ways to register voters:
See the Managing Voters page for more information on creating and managing Voters for a Poll, and on creating a file to add voters using the bulk load mechanism.
When conducting a Poll, you will usually want to send emails to the Voters registered for the Poll to announce the Poll, give the Voters information on how and when to vote, and perhaps report the results of the vote. All Voters must have an email address, as that is how they are uniquely identified in the system.
The site gives you the ability to compose the body of an email that will be sent to voters. It has a "rich text" editor that allows you to create paragraphs, headings, bullet and numbered lists, block quotes, and hyperlinks to external pages. You can style text using bold, italic, underline, and strike-through text, plus align and justify text.
The editor also supports a template mechanism. This allows you to place specially-formatted keywords in the text of the body that will be replaced by corresponding Poll or Voter data when the email is sent. For example, you can cause the title and description of the Poll, the opening and closing dates for voting, and the Registrar's name and email address to be included in the email messages. The emails can be customized for individual Voters by including the Voter's name, email address, and a link to their personal Ballot for voting.
The site provides a default email body and stores it with the other data for the Poll. You can modify or completely replace the email body at any time.
The site stores only one email body per Poll, but you have the ability to copy the email body text in HTML format so that you can store it in an external file. You can later copy that body text from the file and paste it back into Poll. By storing multiple email bodies in separate files, you can have as many different email bodies for a Poll as you want. You can also use this feature to copy email bodies among Polls.
To send emails to Voters, you first establish the text of the email body in the Poll, then tell the site to send emails to the Voters. There are three options that select which Voters will receive emails:
See the Managing Polls page for more information on composing and sending emails. See the Managing Voters page for instructions on how to reset the indication that an email has been sent to a voter. This will allow you to resend emails to voters individually or to send new emails to voters who have already received one.
Once you have defined the properties of a Poll, created and assigned a QuestionSet to the Poll, registered Voters, and sent any necessary emails to Voters, then you are ready to conduct the actual voting process.
Voting is controlled by two properties of the Poll:
The Open and Close times specify the date and time-of-day range during which voting is allowed. If an Open time is not specified for the Poll, voting can occur as soon as the Poll is created. If a Close time is not specified, there is no end to the voting period. These dates and times can be changed at any time, including while voting is in progress.
The Open/Close status places an additional limitation on when voting can occur. If the Poll is in closed status, voting cannot occur regardless of the Open and Close times. If the Poll is in open status, voting can occur only during the period between the Open and Close times. The status can be changed at any time, even while voting is in progress. You can close a Poll after voting has started to suspend voting temporarily or to terminate voting due to some unforeseen circumstance.
By default, a Poll does not have an Open or Close time specified, so by default voting will be controlled solely by the Open/Close status. A Poll is in closed status when it is first created. For most Polls, it is best to define an Open/Close time range and not rely solely on manipulating the Open/Close status to control voting. Polls also have an overall Active/Inactive status. If the Poll is in Inactive status, voting is inhibited. Polls are created with a status of Active and should normally retain that status throughout their useful lifetime. Inactive status is typically used to indicate that a Poll is completely finished and will not be used again. Reporting of voting results is not affected by a Poll being in Inactive status.
Once voting finishes, you will want to see the results. Clicking the Tabulate Votes button on the main panel of the Poll Management page will produce a report of the same form in which a Voter views their Ballot. To the right of the Choices for each Question on the report are counts for the number of times each Choice was selected. Next to that the report shows the percentage that count represents of the total number of Ballots cast and the total number of Voters registered. These statistics can be useful for determining voter participation and quorum.
It is not unusual to conduct an election or a survey repeatedly. For example, a survey to determine member satisfaction with a chapter's operations may be done once or twice a year, and the questions may be the same each time.
It is usually a bad idea to reuse the same Poll each time in these cases, for two reasons:
Therefore, when you have a recurring election or survey, you should create a separate Poll for each one. This is not much work, because most of the effort in creating a Poll is in building its QuestionSet and email body. QuestionsSets are defined separately from Polls, so that an existing QuestionSet can simply be assigned to a new Poll. Email bodies can be copied and pasted between Polls, and if necessary, saved in external files.
Registrars must take care with the types of changes they make to a Poll or its associated QuestionSet once voting begins. In general, no changes to either one should be made once Voters begin casting their Ballots. Correcting typos in question and choice text is usually acceptable as long as the corrections do not change the meaning of the text. Adding new questions and choices may be acceptable depending on how the Poll is being used, e.g., adding a new candidate to an election Poll would not be fair to any Voters who have already cast their Ballots. Registrars should carefully review their Poll and QuestionSet before voting begins. Clicking the View Poll button on the Poll's main panel will display a mock Ballot along with detailed information about the Poll. This mock Ballot has the same format as the Ballot that a Voter will see. You can print this mock Ballot (perhaps to a PDF) and share it with others for their review prior to the start of voting.
In the same way, if a QuestionSet is used by multiple Polls, changing the QuestionSet will affect all of the associated Polls simultaneously. That can be especially significant if the QuestionSet is used by Polls that have been completed, perhaps some years in the past, as the changes can affect the way Ballot data would be interpreted later. For example, if you conduct an annual survey that asks the same questions every year, you may want to compare results over several years to determine trends or measure the effectiveness of changes in policies or practices. Altering the QuestionSet over time will likely alter the relationship between structure of the Ballot and the votes on file. That in turn may compromise the ability to report and interpret past results correctly.
Revised 2026-03-17