We vote so our voices are heard and our opinions are respected when making decisions. There are different ways to vote, it all depends on the number of people, the type of decisions, and if you want the vote to be secret or public.

Let’s say you have a panel of 5 people set up to vote on the best of two candidates’ fit for a role in your company, it’s okay to vote with raised hands. However, if you are selecting candidates using multiple criteria across multiple interview stages, it would be a bit more difficult to use raised hands. 

Another example is having a company-wide vote on whether to go with a hybrid or remote work model. But with over 2000 employees spread across 25 different departments, having each department head tally up the votes and then putting all the results together is just way too stressful and takes up too much time. However, if you’re using a voting form, you can gather everyone’s thoughts without wasting time and you see the results in an organized format.

So, in this article, we’ll be talking about voting forms, and how to create them with a free template to get you started.

Why Do We Need Voting Forms?

We need voting forms for different reasons, but these are at the top of the list:

• Ensuring Fairness and Accuracy: Voting forms keep the election process fair by ensuring every vote is counted and people’s opinions are heard. For example, using verbal votes like “hi vs nay” opens the door to bias and unfair rulings: you may end up following the decisions of the people with the loudest voices not necessarily the majority opinion. 
• Inclusivity and Accessibility: Using voting forms ensures all eligible voters participate. For example, if you run a large company and want a company-wide vote, using an online voting form allows you to gather responses effortlessly. Also, in cases where some voters don’t have access to electronic voting systems or prefer paper ballots, you can mail them a physical form or share a PDF of the voting form and they’ll fill it out and submit it.
• Record Keeping: Using voting forms creates a physical record of each vote and allows you to be transparent about the voting process. This way your voters can see the results of the vote and you have evidence if there are allegations of malpractice or election rigging.

Components of a Voting Form

Here are the most important fields to have in your voting form:

• Title and Instructions:  tell respondents what they voting for, and how their opinions decide the final decisions so they carefully vote. You can also add help text and descriptions to guide respondents on the voting process.
• Voter Information Section (Optional): This includes the voters’ name, and ID, if it’s a company it could include the voters’ department or level in the organization. Also, depending on the purpose of the vote, you don’t have to include this field. For example, if you are collecting opinions about team members up for promotions, it might be a good idea to skip this field to maintain anonymity.
• Voting Options: Use checkboxes, dropdown menus, or radio buttons to present the voting options e.g. candidates or proposals.
• Additional Feedback (Optional):  You can also add a field for comments or questions about the vote. For example, respondents can say why they chose one proposal over the other.
• Security Features: Use the single-response feature to ensure one voter can only vote once or simply create a list of valid voters, and each person has to select their name to vote.  This will help you prevent people from intentionally influencing the vote in their favor by voting multiple times. You can also use other advanced features like unique voter IDs, or an IP tracker to prevent people from using multiple emails to sway the votes in their favor.
• Submission Instructions: Let your voters know the procedure to submit the form For example, they should review their response before submitting, or maybe download the form and send their response as an email. 

How to Create a Voting Form

The simplest method to creating your voting form is using an already existing template. This way you only need to make a few customizations and you are good to go. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your voting form using a pre-built template:

• Go to the voting form template and click “use template”
• Log in or sign up if you don’t have an account with Formlplus.
• Edit the form fields by adding, removing, or rewriting some of the questions and the response options such as candidate name, proposal name, etc.
• You can also add media such as an instruction video or image to help guide voters
• Customize the form by matching it to your brand colors, adding your organization logo, etc.
• Preview the form across the different device formats to ensure everything looks and works the way it should. You can also test the form by filling it out and seeing how the responses come in.
• Monitor and analyze the votes by looking at the response dashboard. The dashboard has visual data aids like bar charts, and pie charts to help you easily understand the responses and announce the results.

Free Voting Form Template

Here’s what a standard voting form looks like:

This helps you collect the voters’ details including name and email preventing multiple entries by the same person. It allows voters to choose their best option; depending on your voting scenario, you can make it checkboxes if you want to give respondents the option to select more than options.  This template also has an open-ended field that allows respondents to say why they chose a particular voting option.

With this template, all you need to do is customize the questions to fit your voting purpose. For example, you have to change the candidate names to your voting options. You can also customize the voting design by changing the background, adding your company logo as a background, and other design elements such as form color, text font, etc.

Physical Voting Cases

If you are using physical voting forms, here’s a step-by-step guide:

• Go to the voting form template
• Customize the form
• Go to responses and click view form
• Click Ctrl+ P or Command+ P to print the form
• You can also select “print” from your browser options 
• You can either print the form immediately or save it on your device and print it later.

Best Practices for Effective Voting Forms

Here are some best practices to ensure you get the best out of your voting form:

• State the Form’s Purpose: Use a clear form title that tells everyone who views your form what they should do on the form. For example, “Company Vote on Work Model” or “Engineering Course Rep Vote”.
• Keep it Simple:  Keep your questions and form options simple, don’t use technical words or words your respondents don’t use every day. This also means editing ai-generated text if you’re using them to create form questions, for example, instead of “Residence address,” use “Your address”.
• Friendly Layout: Choose a simple font and make sure the text is big enough to read easily. Also, avoid hard-to-read fonts and distracting designs. 

Conclusion

Voting forms make your election process smoother. They remove the stress of physically distributing forms, collecting the responses, and tallying them to get the results. 

With a voting form template, all you need to do is share the form with your voters, and everything is automated, you don’t even have to calculate the results, you will see the results in your responses dashboard. Here’s a template to get you started.