An election lets your association put open committee seats and yes-or-no questions to a member vote. This article explains what an election tracks, how its parts fit together, and how it moves from setup to a certified result. Elections and ballots are currently managed through Rhythm's API, not through a page in the Console or Portal, so your account usually sets them up through an integration.
Positions, Candidates, and Measures
An election can include any number of committee positions from your committees, and each position can have any number of candidates from your contacts. A position can have no candidates, and the same candidate or position can appear more than once on the election. The election does not record how many seats a position has, so the election itself does not limit how many candidates a voter may choose for one position.
Tip
An election does not check a ballot's recorded choice against the candidate list for that position. If a vote count looks inconsistent with the candidate list, remember that the vote was not automatically validated against the candidates on the election.
An election can also include yes-or-no measures, which are straightforward questions with only two possible answers. There is no abstain option and no multiple-choice measure; each ballot answer must be yes or no. Measures do not have a field for recording their outcome, so a certified election shows vote counts for candidates but no yes-or-no result for its measures.
An election can store eligibility criteria that describe who the election is meant for, and it can also store a flag meant to control whether the election appears on the Portal. Neither currently changes who can vote or what members see. The criteria are stored but never evaluated, so they do not admit or refuse voters, and the portal flag does not make an election appear on the Portal by itself.
Opening an Election for Voting
You open an election for voting by setting it to active. An active election must have both an opening and a closing voting date, and the closing date must be after the opening date. The election's earlier status does not prevent you from opening it: you can move an election to active from any status, including certified or cancelled, and you can open an election even when it has no positions, candidates, or measures.
Voting dates do not schedule changes on their own. You must manually move an election to active and manually move it out of active again; the election does not open automatically on its opening date or close automatically on its closing date.
Certifying a Result
Certifying an election declares its result official. You can certify an election from any earlier status, including directly from a draft with no votes recorded, and certification does not require existing candidate counts or measure results.
A candidate's final vote count is entered as a number, separately from the ballots recorded for the election. Rhythm stores whatever number is entered for that candidate, even when it does not match the ballots on file, and it does not check that the number is positive or a whole number. Certification does not freeze the election record afterward: you can still change vote counts, candidates, and the election's status after it is certified. There is no separate record of who certified an election beyond the ordinary record of who last changed it.
Cancelling an Election
Cancelling an election keeps the election record instead of removing it. You can cancel an election that has already been certified, which discards its certified result, and you can later reopen a cancelled election. Cancelling does not change ballots already recorded for the election; they are not refused or removed.
Related
For managing elections and ballots directly, see the API references for creating and maintaining elections, looking up elections, and recording and managing ballots. For how committee positions relate to a chapter's own officers, see How Chapter Officer Permissions Work.