What votesUP is

votesUP is a platform to carry out votings and to support conferences. Both open votings as well as secret ballots are possible with votesUP – legally compliant, privacy-oriented and absolutely confidential.

This is supplemented by an optional programme visualisation, speakers lists, motions on the rules of procedure and chats between participants. All you need 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 votings can be open in parallel
• 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
• Visualisation 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 39,000 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 29 languages (with a focus on European variants)

The platform is operated by a small team and is provided free of charge for events with up to 40 participants. Contributions to the server costs or assistance with translations are 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 makes it possible to conduct the kind of voting that is usually required for conferences and committee meetings. Delayed voting (digital absentee voting) is also possible.

votesUP offers both open and secret voting. It guarantees the special confidentiality of secret ballots: the ballots cast cannot be traced back to individual voters, as they are stored independently and in a randomised order.

Our aim is to design the system as close as possible to a real conference setting: whenever an open vote is taken, everyone in the room can see how each individual has voted. In an analogue setting, however, the seating arrangements or even the size of the delegations affect whether a participant can see what is happening. votesUP ensures that the situation is now the same for everyone.

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

Supported size of events

votesUP supports live events with up to some thousand participants. For votings over a longer period of time (‘digital absentee votings’), several thousand participants are no problem. Free events are limited to 40 attendees, but a limit increase is possible at any time.

You will not need a lot of preparation to use votesUP: just register a new event and get started! Immediately after creating the event, the functionality is still somewhat limited and only six attendees are allowed in. As soon as your e-mail address has been confirmed as the organiser of the event, up to 40 people can participate free of charge.

If you want to organise a larger event or use additional features that are subject to a fee, you can request a limit increase via the event settings. For example, fees apply for adding your own logo or for uploading more than three (or larger) documents to the agenda.

Unconfirmed events are automatically deleted within three days; confirmed events are only deleted if they have been inactive for 90 days.

Security

votesUP is being developed with a high level of security in mind, both in the design of the workflows and in the technical implementation. We take data protection very seriously. In this regard, we also welcome feedback and information on possible problems.

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

➡️ developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory/analyze?host=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.

Development

We are constantly working to further develop and improve votesUP. Not all planned features are available yet, and we also plan to extend existing features.

votesUP is built on top of open-source software, but is not itself developed as open source. This is a pragmatic decision: we want to ensure that organisations can continue their democratic work digitally without major hurdles. However, as a team we are too small to support another development community in addition to reliable server operation and prompt responses to support requests. The questions that are likely to arise about installation options or server security would simply take up too much time away from our core tasks. So we decided not to try to do too many things at once, but to do one thing well: providing the votesup.eu platform.

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