Benefits of Online Voting – Why It’s Time to Go Paperless

The popularity of online voting systems has steadily increased in recent years. The reasons for the adoption of this online technology in favour of paper based systems are numerous. For those yet to embrace online voting, here are a few of the main reasons why industrial relations managers across Australia have made the switch.

Increased Participation

Given agreement voting isn’t compulsory, a driver to increase participation rates is to make voting as simple as possible; and what’s more convenient as being able to vote from your smart phone anywhere at any time? Given technology has created a global village, large and geographically disperse workforces can vote now easily regardless of their location.

When utilising all three voting channels (online, phone and SMS), CiVS clients receive, on average, a participation rate of 86%.

Time Saving

Your agreement negotiation has likely absorbed significant time (and effort) to get a point where you’re ready to go to vote. Do you have the time to print and post ballot slips, wait for them to be returned and finally manually count the votes in conjunction with your returning officer and scrutineer. The vote slips then have to be stored or destroyed. Is this the most effective use of you and your staff’s time?

Online voting will assist you be giving back time, not only for the voter lodging the vote, but by utilising electronic (email and SMS) distribution of relevant information to voters before, and after the vote.

Given electronic voting requires no manual counting a Declaration of Result report will be prepared within hours of the vote closing.

All Votes Captured

As the Australian senate election of 2014 demonstrated, paper ballots are easily lost, stolen or destroyed. Not only are lodged votes anonymous and encrypted, CiVS’ online voting data is securely stored in Australia. The voting software is fully auditable.

Read more about the benefits of CiVS online voting.