Online Voting for Company Elections
Companies (such as corporations, LLCs, or partnerships) use OpaVote for running a variety of types of elections online, such as electing partners, electing community moderators, determining names of conference rooms, or selecting winners of a hackathon.
Companies that use OpaVote include the Financial Times, Herbert Smith Freehills law firm, Plexus Media, RJ Metrics, Stack Exchange, Summit Radiology, and Via Christi Family Medicine.
Below are some different types of online elections you may want to hold along with recommended OpaVote settings.
Electing Officers
The method for electing officers should be specified by your company documents. Where only two people are running for an office, plurality voting is sufficient because ranked voting techniques do not provide additional benefit. When more than two people are running for a position, we recommend using ranked-choice voting because it provides better outcomes than plurality voting.
Approving Partners or Rule Changes
Approving a new partner or a rule change is generally a yes or no decision, and plurality voting is a good method for this type of election.
Hackathon Elections
A company may run an election to choose a winner of a hackathon or have multiple winners (e.g., Most Creative, etc.). For hackathon elections, there are often many candidates and the number of candidates may be almost the same as the number of voters.
For elections with a lot of candidates, we recommend the Borda count. The point system in the Borda count is better able to consider all the preferences on the ballot and makes it much less likely that you will have ties.