Category: Company News

The COVID-19 pandemic has created enormous challenges when it comes to public health, and has significantly impacted the ways in which we live and work. At Simply Voting, we are working around the clock to support organizations as they shift to conducting elections online. Alongside our work in the voting world, we also wanted to contribute to efforts being made by our local medical community to combat the pandemic.

The McGill Emergency COVID-19 Research Fund has brought together more than 250 researchers who are specialized in infectious and immune-mediated diseases in order to engage in vital research that encompasses conducting clinical trials, creating new diagnostic tools, and developing drug therapies.

Simply Voting’s very first customer was the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU); thus, we are proud to be able to donate $10,000 to support the McGill community now, just as they supported us at the very beginning.

For more information regarding the McGill Emergency COVID-19 Research Fund, please visit their website.

The importance of ethics within the elections industry cannot be understated. While companies like Simply Voting are often involved in only a slice of organizational governance, platforms like our own can be critical in ensuring all stakeholders in the democratic process feel elections are conducted transparently and with integrity. Voting systems, and the companies and employees that maintain them, must engender trust in all those involved. To this end, we believe defining the ethics and values that all of us follow at Simply Voting is integral to servicing the needs of our customers and all other involved stakeholders.

Simply Voting maintains a Code of Ethics, which all employees are trained on and attest to on an annual basis. We also maintain an “ethics hotline” where employees or other outside parties may anonymously report ethical problems related to various areas of concern. An Ethics section has been added to our website, where you can read more about Simply Voting’s ethics, including our Code of Ethics and access to ethics related reporting.

We value our customer’s trust in our platform, in our employees, and in our business practices. We know that elections are often mission critical for organizations, and our promise to you is that we at Simply Voting will always strive to maintain the highest ethical principles and standards.

As the world continues to adapt to the COVID–19 pandemic, many organizations, companies, and institutions are re-evaluating the way they interact with one another and conduct their day-to-day business.

Fortunately the impact on Simply Voting has been relatively mild. Demand for internet elections remains strong – in fact, stronger than ever due to a shift from in-person voting to remote voting due to social isolation measures. Our workforce is already equipped for and accustomed to telecommuting which, despite our beautiful office space, has always been a big part of our corporate culture. The data centres and other technical infrastructures of our voting system continue to perform at full service levels.

To prevent spread of the virus and safeguard Simply Voting’s operations we’ve taken a number of steps including:

• Requiring all employees to telecommute except for a rotating skeleton staff at our office space.
• Limiting non-essential business travel and using collaboration tools to conduct virtual meetings with our customers, partners and employees.
• Ensuring that employees have flexible working arrangements and access to childcare to remain productive throughout school closures.
• Following best practices recommended by local and international public-health authorities for safety and sanitizing procedures.
• Closely monitoring our vendors and suppliers to minimize potential upstream risks to our service levels.

We wish to reassure our customers and those who are now seeking online voting services, that we are operating at full capacity and do not anticipate any disruption in our ability to deliver service throughout a prolonged pandemic environment. Simply Voting stands ready to ensure that e-democracy continues in these difficult and trying times.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Please note that our office will be closed from December 23, 2019 until January 3, 2020.

Skeleton staff will be available to support ongoing elections. If you require emergency support during this time please fill out the support form on our website, set the priority to “emergency”, and someone will follow up with you shortly.

Wishing all our customers and partners a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll see you in the New Year!

 

In case you missed it, in April Simply Voting was in Boston meeting insurance and risk management industry professionals. RIMS, the risk management society™ is a not-for-profit representing over 3500 entities in the field of risk management. Simply Voting attended their annual convention to meet with some of these entities. How do online elections fit into risk management? Corporations and insurance captives conduct shareholder votes annually to vote in their board of directors. Some of them even collect proxies to facilitate their vote and meet quorum.

Sound like something you do? Contact us to learn more about the electronic voting and proxy collection solutions we have and are developing for corporations and insurance captives like you.

Happy Holidays from the Simply Voting team!

We will be closed from December 24, 2018 until January 4, 2019.

Skeleton staff will be available to support ongoing elections. If you require emergency support during this time please fill out the support form on our website, set the priority to “emergency”, and someone will follow up with you shortly.

We wish all of our customers a joyful holiday season and we look forward to the online elections that the New Year will bring!

Simply Voting is now SOC 2 Type I certified.

Governed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), SOC 2 was established in order to provide independent evaluation and confidence about an organization’s controls related to security, confidentiality, processing integrity, availability, and privacy.  A Type 1 report provides a description of the organization’s system as a whole, in addition to detailed testing of the design of the organization’s internal controls, all at one specific point in time.

An independent auditing firm, A-LIGN, conducted interviews and examined 198 pieces of evidence relating to our company’s administration, our online voting system, and underlying server infrastructure. Their final report confirmed that Simply Voting meets the established SOC 2 Trust Services Principles regarding Common Criteria/Security, Availability, and Confidentiality.

The SOC 2 is a more extensive audit than the SSAE 16 which Simply Voting had completed in the past. We hope it instills confidence in the integrity of our internet voting solutions.