The UF Voting application is a simple to use web application created for the sole purpose of allowing UF departments to create, administer, and tabulate online elections as they relate to university divisions, groups, and colleges.
The application is comprised of Ballots, Elections, Candidates, and Voters. A single ballot can contain multiple elections and each election, in turn, can contain as few as two and as many as 100 candidates. Voters are simply the list of people that have been given access to vote on a particular ballot.
Behind this structure is an administration section where administrators can set up ballots, elections, candidates, and add lists of voters for those ballots.
Voting Process for Voters
Voting Administration
Voting administrators are able to create new ballots and elections as well as manage the candidates and voters for those ballots.
When logged into the application as an administrator, you will see a special "Administration" tab at the top of the page. Clicking on this will bring you to the administration dashboard.
From this dashboard you can
- Create New Ballots
- Delete Ballots
- Edit Existing Ballots
- Review Ballot Results
- Add New Administrators
A new ballot requires the following information
- Title
- Contact Email
- The contact email that will be displayed to the voters for this ballot.
- Open Date
- The date that the ballot will become available to voters.
- Close Date
- The date that voting will close for this ballot.
- Should votes be anonymous
- If Yes is selected, then no record of what candidate(s) a given voter voted for will be kept. If No is selected, then a record of which candidate(s) a given voter voted for will be kept. This information will be available to the ballot administrator.
- Show results to voters
- If Yes is selected, then the results of the ballot's elections will be displayed to the voter after the voting has closed.
If No is selected, then the results of the ballot's elections will not be displayed to the voter and will be visible only by the ballot administrator.
Once you have this data filled in, make sure to press the Save Ballot button at the lower left hand corner of the window.
Once you have saved the ballot you will notice that the Elections and Voters tabs are now available to you.
To add an election to a ballot go to the elections tab of your ballot and press the Add Election button
Setting up an election requires the following information:
- Title
- the title of the election
- Randomize
- this will randomize the order that the election's candidates will appear for the voters of this ballot
- Votes Required
- A slider allowing for a minimum/maximum range of votes allowed for the election (explained in greater detail below).
- Candidates
- these are the options that the voter will have to vote on for a given election.
When creating an election, you must add candidates before you are allowed to save the election. To add candidates you need to click on the "Add Candidates" link on the lower right hand corner of the Election Details screen.
A window will appear allowing you to enter a single candidate as well as add any description you would like for the given candidate. Hit the OK button to add the candidate. Repeat this process for each candidate you wish to enter.
You will now see your added candidates associated with the election.
Important! After you have added your candidates you should adjust the Votes Required slider. This slider tool allows you to select a Min/Max range for the votes required by a voter for a given election. So, for example, say an election has 10 candidates and the Votes Required field for the election is set to "From 3 to 5 Votes". This means that the voter would be required to select a minimum of three candidates and a maximum of 5 candidates for this election. If you only wanted to allow a single candidate to be selected, you would select "From 1 to 1" from this field.
Be sure to save the Election after you have finished adding candidates.
You may add as many elections as you'd like for a single ballot. To add more elections to a ballot, simply repeat the process outlined above. NOTE: You cannot alter a ballot or any of its elections after voting has begun.
To add voters to an election, select the "Voters" tab of your Ballot. You will see three buttons.
- Add Voters
- Bulk Import Voters
- Delete Voters
The "Add Voters" button will allow you to add voters by UFID, GatorLink, or Name. Entering information in the search fields will produce a list of checkboxes. To add voters, simply select the checkbox of the person/people you wish to add and click on the "Select Users" button.
After adding voters, you will see them listed under the "Voters" tab. After adding voters to an election, be sure to click the "Save Ballot" button on the lower right corner of your screen. Failing to do this after adding voters will mean that the voters you just added will not be included on this ballot.
There is also an option to bulk import voters into a ballot. You may do this by adding a list of UFID's to an Excel spreadsheet and then saving that spreadsheet as a command delimited list (.csv).
After creating your .csv file of UFID's, select the "Bulk Import Voters" button located in the "Voters" tab of your ballot. Select your .csv file in the Bulk Import Voters pop up dialogue and then select the "Import Voters" button.
You will then see a checkbox list of all of the UFID's that were in your .csv file. To select all of those UFID's click on the radio button at the top of the list.
The UFID's that are checked on this list will be the voters added to your ballot. Once you've checked off the appropriate UFID's, click on the "Add Participants" button on the lower right hand corner of your screen.
To delete voters from an election, select the voters you wish to delete from the ballot on the Voters tab of your ballot and click the "Delete Voters" button. You can only delete voters before the ballot start date.
To view ballot results click on the "View" link in the results column for your ballot on the administration dashboard page.
From this page, you will be able to see the results of voting on the individual elections on your ballot. If your ballot was set up as Non-Anonymous, there will be a "View Votes" link atop each candidate of each election. Selecting this link will allow you to see the individual votes for that particular candidate. If the ballot was set up as Anonymous, this link will not be present.
For questions about UF Voting, or to have an account set up for your unit to manage its own online ballots and elections, please email voting@aa.ufl.edu.
