Publish Election Results Publicly
Categorized as: Election Tips, Product Development, Time Savers
Elections results may be published publicly. The benefit—as opposed to a client retrieving the results from their account and then accouncing the results through some other means—is that when voters see the results published publicly on the Skypunch website, they understand that an independent, third-party specialist has been retained to conduct the election and is putting its certification mark on the results.
Furthermore, this feature eliminates the hassle of communicating the results to your voters as it is as simple as pointing to a link specific to an election’s results. That link is provided in two places. One is at the Election settings page of My account, under the Publish results heading. Or secondly at the election results page itself within My account.
For clients that wish for results to not be publicly viewable, you may simply disable results publishing at the election settings link of My account. The default setting is to publicly publish the results, but simply switching the setting from Yes to No, ensures no one will be able to view results other than the election administrator.
Results have gotten more complex over the years. In the earliest years, results were nothing more but the count of votes received by each candidate. Then it included the number of ballots cast each day throughout an election. Next, the ballot permitted accepting comments from voters, and that comment report became a part of results reporting. Results may be segmented by either voter group and/or special interest group when those things are in use and finally, when demographic data is associated with each voter, the results may be segmented by demographics. All of that compounds the amount of information which may be included in election results and creates the potential for an enormous amount of information to be republished by a client! Fortunately it’s all available from a single link that is ready for viewing at the moment an election concludes. As a client, you do not need to do anything more than just direct voters and candidates to that link.