Simply Voting

See the Voting and Elections service page about Simply Voting at SFU. The vendor also has support and information on their homepage: https://simplyvoting.com  

Yes, SFU has an account with Simply Voting. Any email address (SFU or non-SFU) can participate in an election, but if you wish to host an election, then you must be an SFU account holder supporting teaching, learning, research, or administration at the university and request an account from the Voting and Elections service page.  

Survey Monkey is the recommended web survey tool that is in use across the university. It offers extensive features including customizable surveys, secure data handling, and efficient data analysis tool. Simply Voting is the recommended voting tool that meets SFU’s security functionality standards. This service is provided to support voting for university-related teaching, learning, research, and administrative purposes. 

To participate in an election, you can simply click on the link that was emailed directly to you, or you can visit https://sfu.simplyvoting.com and log in using your SFU Computing ID and password. You’ll be able to view all the elections you’re allowed to vote in if you’ve been added to a vote using your SFU Computing ID. 

To hold an election, you will need to create an account from the Voting and Elections service page with your SFU ID to become an election manager.  If you have already requested an account to be an election manager, to manage your elections you must visit: https://simplyvoting.com  Enter "sfu" as the "Voting Website" and click the login button. This will then log you in via SFU CAS. Once logged in, you will see your Simply Voting dashboard where you can create or manage elections

If you want to hold an election with both SFU and non-SFU users, you will need to use the vote segmentation tool.  You can add voters for whom you have SFU Computing IDs into one segment and send them an invitation to log in using SFU CAS, and other users for whom you only have an email address can be put in a separate segment and sent a different email invitation that gives them a unique, one-time link to vote.  It's best to send separate messages to each segment with instructions tailored for that group: for example, send a message to the SFU Computing ID group that simply points them to https://sfu.simplyvoting.com to log in, where they will see their eligible elections displayed on the dashboard; for the other segment with only email addresses, send them an email with the custom voting link.  There are many ways to handle this situation, including the approach of sending all voters a unique link instead of requiring SFU CAS login: we'd suggest using CAS whenever possible and for highly sensitive votes where the strongest possible auditing is needed. 

For any other questions or support, you can visit Simply Voting’s support page.  

In order to require people to log in via SFU CAS, you must upload your voters' list with the Elector ID field containing the SFU Computing ID. The SFU Computing ID is the identifier that you usually use to log in to campus system without @sfu.ca appended. For example, "kipling" is the SFU Computing ID, not "kipling@sfu.ca" or other email address variants like "rudyard_kipling@sfu.ca"
When you use this method, you can use the default email template to send out messages that will include only the voting website URL: https://sfu.simplyvoting.com . When a person visits that address, they will be asked to log in with SFU CAS and be presented with a dashboard showing them the elections for which they are eligible to vote. The default "Email Blast" template includes the SFU site URL via the {{voting_website_link}} placeholder, so the default email template can be used.

When you upload your voters list from a CSV file, you can use email addresses for both the "Elector ID" and the "Email" fields. In this scenario, people will not use SFU CAS to login but will instead get a unique link sent to allow a single vote to be made from each email address.
When you use this method, you will need to modify the default "Email Blast Template" to replace {{voting_website_link}} with {{direct_vote_link}}. {{direct_vote_link}} will be replaced in the email body with a unique, one-time voting link for the recipient of the email. .

There are two ways that people can be given access to an election as a elector/voter in Simply Voting:

Both methods offer anonymity and one-vote-per elector, but using SFU CAS is the preferred method for critical votes and elections. In order to use SFU CAS, your voters' list must be uploaded to Simply Voting using the electors' SFU Computing IDs. The SFU Computing ID is the 8-character-or-less ID that an individual typically types into systems to log in (eg. Rudyard Kipling may have an email address of rudyard_kipling@sfu.ca, but log in as "kipling" into SFU systems. The "kipling" variant is what is needed for the Simply Voting voters' list in order to enable log in using SFU CAS). If you have lists of voters in a tool such as SFU Maillist or SFU Groups, you can download the SFU Computing ID from those lists/groups, but you may need to remove the "@sfu.ca" suffix from each entry in order to get the format needed for Simply Voting -- eg. "kipling@sfu.ca" downloaded from one of those tools becomes "kipling") 

 

Note: Voter ID should be the SFU Computing ID (eg. "kipling"), not a staff/student ID number (eg. "30005555"). Computing IDs can be found in various administrative systems such as MyINFO for staff, or can be downloaded from SFU Maillist or SFU Groups if you have the target membership in an existing list or group. If you do *not* have a complete list of SFU Computing IDs for your electors/voters, you can alternatively use email addresses and have the system send out unique, one-time voting links to each email address on your voting list. Both methods restrict votes to one per voter appropriately. If you use the approach where you have access to SFU Computing IDs you can ensure that voters are validated by SFU's CAS sign-on method, which provides an extra layer of security by requiring that the voter is authenticated directly at the time of voting.