What votesUP is

votesUP is a platform to hold ballots and to support conferences. Both open voting as well as secret ballots are possible with votesUP. This is supplemented by an optional programme visualisation, speakers lists, motions on the rules of procedure and chats between participants. All that is needed to use the system is an internet-capable device (smartphone, tablet, notebook) running a browser.

At the time being, votesUP offers you the following functionality:

• Open votes and secret ballots
• Simple and complex “X from Y” voting
• Ballot papers with picture
• Plurality votings, e.g. first-past-the-post and others
• Spontaneous and prepared voting
• Several parallel votings in the mode for « absentee voting »
• Different voting weights of the participants and splitting of votes
• Delegation or transfer of voting rights
• Voting can have a predefined deadline
• Optional: automatic forwarding of participants to external website after voting
• Results visible immediately after completion or via explicit activation
• Flexible management of your participants: upload lists or allow them in spontaneously
• Access with e-mail address or anonymous access tokens
• Automated, personal email invitations to all your participants
• Optional one-time email verification and two-factor authentication
• Use it for live events and for digital absentee votes
• Interactive waiting room for new participants
• Role-based user accounts: voters, guests, hosts, election observers
• Visualization of the programme/agenda
• Provision of documents for the participants
• Speakers lists for the meeting, one for each agenda item
• Speakers lists based on genders (female, male, non-binary, no information)
• Automatic recognition of genders for quota rules etc. (vocabulary of more than 34,000 names)
• Personalised e-mail reminders when voting deadline approaches
• Procedural motions
• Presentation mode for video projectors and online streaming
• Brainstorming sessions with all participants
• Chat between participants and with the organisers
• Automated minutes keeping
• Export of voting results by e-mail
• Close, reset, duplicate and delete the event
• User interface in German (informal “du“), German (formal “Sie“) and Euro-English

The platform is operated by a team of volunteers and provided free of charge for events with up to 40 participants. Any contribution to the server costs or by helping to translate votesUP to other other languages is welcome. For larger events, a financial contribution is required.

Detailed information can be found in the ➡️ manual.

votesUP in action

The following screenshots provide some impressions of the live operation. votesUP adapts also to smaller screen sizes.

Welcome screen for the participants

Offene Abstimmung mit Ja-Nein-Enthaltung

Laufende Abstimmung in der Veranstalteransicht

Rückschau auf Abstimmungsergebnisse:
Geheime und offene Abstimmungen mit unterschiedlichen Stimmgewichten

Geheime Abstimmung mit erweiterten Optionen

votesUP – our concept

This platform enables online votings that are usually needed for conferences and committee meetings.

votesUP offers both open and secret ballots. It ensures the particular confidentiality of secret ballots: the ballots cast are not traceable to the individual voter, because they are stored independently of each other and in random rows.

Our aim is to orient the system as closely as possible to a real-life conference setting: whenever an open vote is taken, everyone in the room can see how individuals voted. In the analogue setting, however, the seating positions or even the size of the delegations have an influence on whether a participant can observe the things that are happening. votesUP ensures that the situation is now the same for everyone.

Of course, sometimes things go wrong at a conference. No problem: you can repeat votes at any time. votesUP notes the repetition, but does not remove the results of the incorrect vote: transparency for the participants is always ensured.

💡 Tipps, damit eure Online-Abstimmungen erfolgreich durchgeführt und nicht angezweifelt werden können, haben wir ➡️ hier zusammengestellt.

Supported size of events

votesUP supports live events with up to some thousand participants. By default, new/free events are limited to 40 participants, yet you may request a limit increase at any time. Ballots that are open for several days or weeks can even include several thousand voters.

You will not need a lot of preparation to use votesUP: just register a new event and get started! If you are conducting an event with more then 30 participants, we recommend to also register the dates, so that we can plan the servers resources in advance. For events with more than 50 participants, the date registration is obligatory. If you are planning a larger event, you can submit a request to increase the participant limit via the event settings.

Immediately after creation, an event is still limited: in order to include more than six people, the event must have a confirmed email address for contact. Unconfirmed events are automatically deleted within three days, confirmed events only after 90 days of inactivity.

Security

We develop votesUP with extensive consideration of privacy aspects and security. Yet nobody is perfect: therefore don't hesitate to give feedback in case you encounter strange situations or problems with votesUP.

If you want to get a first impression about some of our security measures, external security tools such as the Mozilla Observatory, the SSL labs or a scanner for Content Security Policies provide reports of their scans of votesUP:

➡️ observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/votesup.eu
➡️ www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=votesup.eu
➡️ geekflare.com/tools/csp-test

At our news page we provide regular updates about improvements and new features. [Sorry only in German language at the moment.]

Development

We are actively working on further enhancements of votesUP. Not all planned functionality is there yet, and besides, we want to improve some existing features as well.

We are happy to receive feedback from you. Simply get in touch by e-mail: support@votesup.eu.