In the second part of our series on increasing your election turnout, we are taking a look at the more human aspects of turnout. Read on to learn how to gain valuable insight into the minds of your voters and fostering higher turnouts for your elections.
Capture the attention of your electorate at the right time.
Ensure that you market your election in the right way and at the right time. If voting at your AGM, an online election enables you to create ballots on the fly and allows members who couldn’t vote attend the AGM or who are stuck in traffic to vote easily from where they are.
Even if you do not do live-voting, you still have a perfectly captive audience. You can hand out paper election slips or postal voting documents to save on postage. Alternatively, you can schedule your online election to open during the meeting so that you can encourage members to vote then and there on their smartphones, tablets or computers provided.
Marketing your election
Ultimately, the more you put into your election planning, the more you will get out. If you spend time and effort finding out what really matters to your voters, you can be sure to emphasize the core issues that are important.
- Use a dedicated election website, or host a page on your website devoted to your upcoming election. This allows voters to find out everything they need to know about voting both off and online.
- Candidate bios should be short, yet succinct. Too often do candidates write lengthy texts about themselves which makes it harder for voters to find out who they want to actually vote for. Give your candidates a minimum and maximum word count.
- Email reminders are a good solution in ensuring a higher turnout.
You can send out a mass email to your electorate reminding them to vote. Using our system, you can send out a mass email to those members who have not voted yet. This helps to avoid annoying your electorate with too many emails. We recommend sending out a minimum of one reminder 12-24 hours before the election is due to close.
Using personal communication helps considerably with increasing voter turnout. Encourage colleagues to remind friends and other colleges to spread the word. You can also set up a social media template that people can copy to post that they have voted in your election.
Online Elections for a Voter Turnout Boost
The crucial thing to remember that most voters are not disinterested in your election. Most voters just lack the time or drive for complicated election procedures.
Enabling online voting will help to ensure that there is well-publicized information about your election available. We are also able to remind them to vote (not intrusively) once the election has started.