How Long Should Elections Last?
Categorized as: Election Tips, Increase Voter Turnout
The United States of America is capable of electing a new President in less than twenty-four hours. Why then should it take upwards of four weeks to elect the President of a private organization? The answer is, it shouldn’t, and conducting an election with a four-week voting period is a holdover from the antiquated paper-based process once used for conducting private elections. When it was necessary for paper ballots to be mailed, filled out, returned and tabulated, it was understandable that it could take a period of up to a month—particularly if some of the voters were oversees. But today, with the ability to conduct elections across the world wide web, the voting period can and should be reduced to just a few days.
Of course, it is rare when an organization has email addresses for all its voters and even more rare when all those email addresses are up-to-date. For this reason, most organizations are generally unable to conduct an election in the span of only twenty-four hours without a high probability of disenfranchising some voters. Voters without email addresses are handled offline and in cases where a voter’s email address is no longer valid there can be some turnaround time in making that discovery and getting it corrected. It should be noted, that for the best possible voter turnout, an organization should never rely solely on email anyway. Monthly publications, notices on a web site and whatever other communication channels are at your disposal should all be put to use in notifying voters about an election.
So four weeks is an antiquated and unnecessarily long duration for an election, and one day is generally too short to deal with practical concerns. What then, is the ideal length for an election? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but generally recommend about ten days. That allows enough time to send an email announcement at the start of the election, plus one or maybe two reminders during the course of the election. It also allows ample time to provide service to any voter who may need it and gives time for an election administrator to enter any paper ballots into the system that may need to be accounted for.
That said, if you’re in a position to pull it off even quicker, go for it!
