Category: Voting System

Simply Voting is committed to provide an easy and flexible election manager to allow all election organisers to set up smooth stress free elections. With the objective of always improving our services/offer, we are happy to announce the launch of a new functionality: Un-finalization.

We understand that finalizing your election can be stressful as last-minute changes might come up. Whether it is to accommodate a last-minute candidate, to fix a typo on your ballot or to modify your electors list. Flexibility is the key to ensuring the integrity and efficiency of the voting process.

That is why we are introducing the “un-finalize” functionality, which allows you to call-off your finalization in order to make the necessary changes to your election. Once the changes are made, you will be able to re-finalize the election at no additional cost if you still have the same number of electors. If you added electors, you will be offered to pay for an upgrade.

To learn more about this new functionality and how to use it, please visit our help guide.

With this new functionality, managing your elections becomes easier, more efficient and more stress free than ever.

Finding ways to enhance customer experience is always a driving force at Simply Voting, and because of this we are pleased to announce our new Roles feature for streamlining user permissions.

Accounts on Simply Voting often have multiple organizational users, since managing elections sometimes isn’t just a one person job, or other stakeholders might be involved in helping keep elections transparent and auditable. If you are still sharing a single user login among organizational staff – we would encourage you to review best practices and create individual users (click here to learn more)!

To facilitate managing multiple users, we’ve launched roles. Roles provide a set of permissions which can be applied to multiple users, and to get you started you will find several default roles reflecting popular groups of user permissions.

Customers also have the option to create their own more nuanced roles (click here to learn more). For instance, a “scrutineer” role might have permissions related to read-only access to the Electors, Results, and Reports sections, but no access to any other sections within an election. Any edits to the defined permissions for custom roles like this, such as say updating the scrutineer role to also include full access to the Account Log section, would then update the permissions of all users assigned to this role – saving you the headache of updating each user one by one and ensuring everything is the same across the board for the group of users.

We hope this feature enhancement helps keep your user management simple! Don’t hesitate to contact Support if you have any issues, questions, or concerns.

In today’s world, data security is paramount. Protecting your organization’s data wherever it may be is a critical element of any organization’s security practices and policies. And when it comes to voting events and elections run on Simply Voting, security goes hand-in-hand with election integrity.

What is Two-Factor Authentication?

Two-factor authentication (2FA), put simply, is an added layer of security that can be enabled by users on your organization’s account. Two-factor is shown to significantly decrease the risk of an account breach by combining two forms of protection — something ideally only you should know (e.g. your username and password) with something only you have available (e.g. your mobile device). Simply Voting supports two-factor authentication through any number of reliable authenticator applications.

Enabling Two-Factor Authentication on your User Account

The handy Election Manager Guide’s Account Management section covers how to enable and disable two-factor authentication. To enable it, you’ll need your mobile device. Then Simply log into your account as you normally would, and proceed to the Security section of your account. Locate the Two-Factor Authentication section and follow the instructions provided. Once completed, you will see a notice that your account is protected.

Logging into the Election Manager with Two-Factor Authentication

When you attempt to log into the Election Manager tool, you’ll use your username and password just like before. After that step, you’ll also be prompted to complete a secondary login element related to two-factor authentication, as shown in the screenshot below and in this FAQ item in our Help section.

Security Check-up

Finally, while in the Security section, take a moment do a security check-up on your password as well. Are you using it with any other website? Is it sufficiently secure? Are your security questions up-to-date? When in doubt, take those extra steps to help protect both your account and the integrity of your voting events and elections on Simply Voting.

 

Simply Voting has launched a redesigned Election Manager for the Voting System. From the start, we set out to craft a modern and intuitive customer experience, without sacrificing the core principle that drives us as a company — simplicity. It was clear our Voting System’s design, while lovingly crafted many years ago, needed an overhaul to match the diverse needs of our customers and to bring it up-to-date with a contemporary approach to end user experience.

With the redesign, users will find the Election Manager more visually informing, as well as more responsive on mobile devices so they can manage their election on the go. While the redesign’s refined aesthetic enhancements are important, the functionality of the user interface remains unchanged – there is no feature loss.

So what does the Election Manager look like now? Lets take a brief tour!

Account Navigation and Settings

Upon logging in, as before you begin on the Elections page, with a listing of all your elections. In the screenshot below, highlighted in yellow, is your main navigation menu within your account — analogous to the same navigation menu that was previously across the top of the Elections page. From this menu, you will find additional pages for managing account Users, account Settings, as well as your own User Profile and Security, and a way to return to the main Elections page.

With a deeper look into the Settings page, again highlighted in yellow, you’ll find familiar pages that cover your Organizational Details, Billing history, Voting Website design, and the overall Account Log. Other sections from the “old” Settings page exist here too.

Election Management

While managing your elections might look a bit different, again the underlying structure and wording remains unchanged to help ensure users won’t find themselves lost. Throughout the Election Manager, now users will find tool-tipped buttons to help guide them along the way in various Action columns, mimicking the “old” action links. In the screenshot below, we’re heading into an election to further manage it.

Once inside an election users will find a navigation menu, as shown in the screenshot below and highlighted in yellow, that mimics the “old” dropdown navigation menu. Again the order and wording remains unchanged to help ensure users can navigate with ease. Plus, within any draft election you’ll find the handy Election Checklist to help keep you on task.

Help!

If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, don’t worry! As you may have noticed, in the right corner of screen you’ll always find a little Help button following you around, on any page within the Election Manager. Clicking Help will bring you to our expansive suite of Guides that can walk you through anything step-by-step. Our Help documentation has been updated to match the user interface experience, so keep it handy as a resource.

And if you need more support or have additional questions, our Support Team is always standing by!

Final Thoughts

We hope our redesign meets your expectations and approval. We’ve listened to our customers and outside experts to deliver a more intuitive experience. However at Simply Voting, development never stops — and we can look forward to continued improvements to the new interface over time.

Today Simply Voting is launching a feature to enhance customer experience — the ability for all accounts to have multiple users, each with their own unique logins, and the ability to configure fine-grained permissions for a variety of electoral requirements. Below you can find information about how this migration to multiple users works if you are a customer that has never had multiple users before, as well as how things work going forward if you are a customer who used the legacy multiple administrators feature.

Also as part of this update, accounts are now required to have an “owner” user, and the Election Manager’s “Settings” page has been refined — more on those items below.

 

Customers New to Multiple Users

Customers who are new to multiple users still initiate login to the Election Manager tool as before — by clicking the login link located in the upper right corner of the www.simplyvoting.com webpage.

Once you’ve reached the Election Manager’s login page, provide your Voting Website in the input field and click the Login button.

As part of the migration to multiple users, this first time you attempt to login you will be prompted to choose a memorable username that will be uniquely yours. If you also plan on creating additional users later to support your organization’s election management, it may be prudent to decide on a consistent format for usernames following any of the examples described in the instructions on the page shown below, though a consistent format isn’t strictly necessary either. In the end, as long as whatever you end up choosing is memorable and makes sense for your organization and its use case, that is all that matters!

Type your current password into the appropriate field, and then type your desired username into the other field. Click the Submit button when ready.

After submission, you will receive a Green Success Message confirming that you’ve successfully migrated your Simply Voting account to allowing multiple users going forward.

You can now login with your new username and current password going forward. You can also bookmark this URL with your Voting Website already filled out, if you would like to quickly return to it in the future.

To login in the future at www.simplyvoting.com, users will always need to know their: Voting Website for the first login step, and then their Username and Password for the second login step.

Click here to review the newly updated Account Management section of the Election Manager Guide to review information about how to use this newly integrated user management feature.

We hope this update adds greater security and auditability to your account management, while also empowering your organization’s election management. Don’t hesitate to contact Support if you have any issues, questions, or concerns.

 

Customers Who Used the Legacy Multiple Administrators Feature

For customers who previously used the legacy multiple administrators feature, instead of bookmarking and using a special Election Manager login page, now you will simply navigate to www.simplyvoting.com and click the Login link in the upper right corner.

Once you’ve reached the Election Manager’s login page, provide your Voting Website in the input field and click the Login button.

You will be prompted to type your existing Username and your existing Password and click the Login button. You can bookmark this URL if you would like to quickly return to it in the future as well.

If you need a refresher on managing multiple users, click here to review the newly updated Account Management section of the Election Manager Guide to review information about how to use manage users now.

Don’t hesitate to contact Support if you have any issues, questions, or concerns.

 

Owner User

Every Simply Voting account is required to have an “owner” user, and ownership can be transferred by an owner to another user should it be necessary to do so. Identifying owners ensures we have a primary contact for your account. Click here to review more information about an owner user, and how to transfer ownership to another user in your account.

 

Settings Page Refinement Inside the Election Manager Tool

The Settings page within the Election Manager tool has also underwent refinement. Click here to review the Election Manager Guide’s section on the Settings page.

 

A core aspect of our mission at Simply Voting has been to ensure that the voter interface is accessible — whether that accessibility comes in the form of technology compatible with screen-readers for visually impaired voters, or in supporting internet browser versions released a decade ago for those voters still using older devices, etc. And plainly, the language in which voters interact with the Voting System can be a key component to an organization’s own mission to help ensure voter enfranchisement.

To this end, Simply Voting has pleased to announce additional language support options for any organization’s voting website and ballot. This brings our total to 17 supported language options for the voter interface, with new languages being Hindi, Finnish, and Swedish:

English French Italian German Spanish

Russian Portuguese Dutch Finnish Swedish

Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese Japanese Korean Hindi

Arabic Hebrew

To learn more about how to activate multi-language support for your elections, please visit our Help section.

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are on the rise and have evolved into complex and overwhelming security challenges for organizations large and small. Although DoS attacks are not a recent phenomenon, the methods and resources available to conduct and mask such attacks have dramatically evolved to include distributed (DDoS) and, more recently, distributed reflector (DRDoS) attacks.

Simply Voting recently launched an enhanced protection service, which involved coordination between Radware, a specialized DoS protection company, and Terago, our hosting provider.

Radware’s DDoS protection service monitors all traffic entering its network for large-volume floods that aim to disrupt the services. Features of this best-in-class protection include behavioral-based detection using advanced, patented machine learning algorithms to protect against known and unknown threats; protection against network and application-layer DDoS attacks, protection against encrypted flood attacks without requiring customers to provide decryption keys and without adding latency in peacetime, as well as extensive compliance options and certifications, unparalleled by any rival, including industry-specific certifications such as PCI and HIPAA, as well as cloud security standards such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 27032, etc.

Simply Voting enjoys the protection of an always-on solution that combines Radware’s DefensePro attack mitigation appliances with their Cloud DDoS Protection Service. The DefensePro locally filters all traffic entering Simply Voting’s private cloud infrastructure hosted at Terago data centres. If additional mitigation capacity is needed the DefensePro automatically triggers a redirection of traffic to Radware’s cloud-based scrubbing centres. This hybrid solution leverages the real-time protection and minimal latency of an on-premise solution with the massive capacity of a cloud service that is activated on demand.

Importing a list of eligible voters into Simply Voting is now easier than ever. Using our brand-new Electors Import Assistant, election administrators can now easily import electors into their election without having to reorder, merge, or delete columns from their original spreadsheet.

Now when you import your electors, the assistant will pop-up and display the first few rows of your file for review. From there, you can “map” the elector data in your file to the available Voting System fields by using dropdown menus at the bottom of each column.

Feature highlights

• No reordering required: You can now import your electors into Simply Voting without having to order the columns in your spreadsheet in any specific way. If a column is not relevant to your election, simply leave it designated as “Ignore” in the new Elector Import Assistant, and it will not be imported.
• Easily merge names: If your spreadsheet includes first and last names in two separate columns, Simply Voting can now automatically merge them together into a single column. Just assign the “First Name” and “Last Name” data fields to their respective columns using the new Elector Import Assistant, and Simply Voting will do the rest.
• Support for semi-colon delimited files: You can now import electors or options from either comma-delimited or semicolon-delimited CSV files.

A detailed guide for Managing Electors is available inside our Help Portal. As always, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about this new feature, or anything else we might be able to assist you with!

Voter communication is a core part of any election project. Today, we are excited to announce the addition of Bad Emails, a new tool that gives election administrators more control and insight into email specific issues and how those issues might be resolved.

Feature highlights

• No more mystery! Bounced emails are now accompanied with an explanation for each bounce, so you can identify the appropriate path to resolving the issue, whether it is a typo in the address, a spam report, or an inbox being full.
• Unsubscribed email addresses are now included in your Bad Emails report, so you get a full picture of your email deliverability at any given time.
• You can now review the existing list of Bad Emails as soon as you upload your Electors into a draft election, and see which electors, if any, have already unsubscribed or have a bad email address on record.
• Email addresses that bounced back in the past and remain unresolved will continue to appear in your Bad Emails report until you update them, so you never lose focus of whose email address needs to be edited.
• Your list of Bad Emails can be exported at any time as a CSV file, so you can share it with other election organizers who do not have access to the Election Manager.

You can now conveniently keep an eye on the total number of bad emails in your election at any given time, right from the Election Overview page. Since each election organizer sets their own priority for fixing email issues, we’ve eliminated the email bounce notifications in favour of a more robust tool that allows you to manage your email list on your own terms.

A step-by-step walkthrough of the new Bad Emails feature is available inside our Help Portal. As always, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about this new feature, or anything else we might be able to assist you with.

Did you know?

Electors who have unsubscribed in the past can always re-subscribe themselves by sending an email message to resubscribe@simplyvoting.com from the unsubscribed email address.

When it comes to protecting data, two important areas to focus on are encryption in transit and encryption at rest.

Encryption in transit involves encrypting data while it’s being transferred, so that it cannot be intercepted as it travels from point A to point B. Communication between the voting system and the browsers of voters, election organizers, and Simply Voting staff has always been encrypted at all times to protect against attacks using strong protocols and ciphers. This is best practice for encryption in transit.

Encryption at rest involves encrypting data where it is stored, so that it cannot be used by an attacker that gains access to it.

The most sensitive information – passwords and votes – have always been encrypted by Simply Voting prior to being stored in the voting system’s database. This is an added layer of security to protect against a breach of the database.

Thanks to a recent upgrade of our database software, all data is now encrypted by the database engine before it is saved using a technology called Transparent Data Encryption. Not just passwords and votes but also elector information, candidate details, customer information, etc.. This is done using industry standard AES-256 encryption, and it applies to older data as well as new data moving forward. This technology provides an added layer of security to protect against unauthorized access to the storage used by the database.

Bottom line, Simply Voting is always working on better ways to protect our customers and their data.