Evaluating Online Voting Vendors for a Professional Election
You have published the tender, the deadline has passed, and the offers are on your desk. Now comes the harder part: deciding which provider you trust to run an election whose result must hold up to scrutiny. For a board, a medical council, a professional order or a federation, an electronic election is not an IT purchase like any other — a contested result can paralyse the body it was meant to constitute.
Here are seven questions that separate a serious provider from a risky one, in the order they matter.
1. Can they prove the vote is secret?
Any vendor will claim the ballot is secret. Ask how. The right answer describes a design where the link between voter and vote is broken cryptographically, not merely a promise that "we don't look". If the explanation relies on the provider's good behaviour rather than on the system's architecture, treat it as a red flag.
2. Is the election end-to-end verifiable?
End-to-end verifiability means a voter can check that their vote was recorded as intended and counted as recorded, and that anyone can verify the tally — without breaking secrecy. This is the single strongest guarantee against both error and manipulation. Ask the vendor to demonstrate it, not just mention it.
3. Have they run elections like yours?
References matter, but relevant references matter more. A provider with experience in large public ballots may have never handled a multi-college professional election with quorum rules and category-based seats. Ask for comparable cases: similar size, similar structure, similar stakes.
4. Where does the data live, and for how long?
Confirm the hosting location, the data processing agreement, the retention period and the deletion process. For a public institution, hosting that meets your residency requirements may be a hard constraint, not a preference. Get it in writing before, not after.
5. What happens on the worst morning?
Imagine the last day of voting: a login server hiccups, a voter cannot authenticate, turnout spikes at lunchtime. Ask the vendor exactly what their support does in that moment — response time, escalation path, named contact. Election day has no rehearsal, so the support plan must be concrete.
6. Is the result reproducible after the fact?
A trustworthy election produces evidence that survives it: a signed result report and audit material that an independent expert can re-check months later if anyone disputes the outcome. If the only proof of the result is "the platform said so", you are buying convenience, not legitimacy.
7. Did they price the cheapest tool or the safest election?
Finally, read the offer against your own criteria. The lowest bid often strips out exactly the things that make an election defensible — verifiability, support, audit material. Score security, verifiability and references alongside price, and be honest about what a contested election would cost you compared to the difference between two quotes.
Ask these seven questions and the strongest offer usually becomes obvious. At ONLZ, we welcome every one of them — because a buyer who asks how the vote stays secret and how the result can be proven is exactly the buyer we are built for.
