Elections

Turn elections on, and decide which officer roles are allowed to run them.

fellos runs officer elections end to end: nominations, campaigning, a ballot, and — the part that matters most — installing the winners into their roles when the result is certified. Nobody edits an officer record by hand afterwards.

There are two things to set up, and they live on different pages.

1. Switch elections on

Go to Admin → Members → Elections. The page holds a single switch, Enable Elections: "When enabled, members see the Elections section and conductors can run elections." Flipping it confirms with Elections enabled or Elections disabled.

2. Designate your Election Conductors

Running an election is a designation you grant to an officer role, not to a person, and not an admin tier. Go to Admin → Organization → Governance and expand a board to see its roles. The role table has a column headed ELECT — switch it on for any role whose holder should be able to run elections. Its description is "Can set up, run, and certify elections".

Two things worth being clear about:

• ELECT is not COMPT. The neighbouring COMPT column is the Comptroller designation, which covers financial oversight and has nothing to do with elections. Granting one does not grant the other.
• Nothing is granted by default. No role arrives with the Election Conductor flag switched on, so until you set one, only Site Admins can run an election.

So an election can be run by a Site Admin — with Admin Mode on — or by any member holding an officer role that has ELECT switched on. That second group is the point of the feature: your secretary can run the election without being given administrative access to the rest of your site.

Before your first election

Check your member types. A member type that is not allowed to hold officer roles cannot be nominated, and the election wizard will tell you so — you allow it on the Member Types admin page, or exclude that type from the election's eligibility rules instead.

Creating an election

Elections are created and run from the member-facing Elections section, not from the admin area. Open Elections in the sidebar and choose New election. It is a four-step wizard — Details, Positions, Eligibility and Review — with Back and Next between steps and Create election at the end.

Details & schedule

• Title and Description — what members will see in the list.
• Election type — Standard (choose one), or a ranked ballot where voters order the candidates.
• Test election — see below. Use it for your first run.
• Who can view this election — Only the people taking part, Everyone, or Specific member types and organizations. The last option is how a chapter-only election still lets everyone else follow along.
• Voting starts and Voting ends. Enable nomination period adds Nominations open and Nominations close; Enable campaign period turns on the campaign phase. Only the periods you configure appear on the member-facing timeline.
• Seconds required — how many seconds a nomination needs before it reaches the ballot. Leave it at zero and nominations need none. Whatever you set is printed back to members as SECONDS REQUIRED on the election page.
• Win percentage, Automatically open a run-off if no candidate wins and Run-off voting window (minutes) — the threshold a candidate has to clear and what happens if nobody does. With no threshold set, Review reports the election as Simple plurality with Run-offs as Manual (conductor opens).

Positions

Pick an Organization and a Role and press Add, once per seat on the ballot. Until you add one the step reads No positions added yet. Add at least one position to continue. and refuses to advance with At least one position is required.

Because a position is an organization plus a role, one election can fill several seats at once — and a multi-chapter organization can elect chapter officers on the same ballot as association-wide ones.

Eligibility

This is the longest step, and the one most worth reading before you run a real election. It is four independent rule sets, in this order: Who can vote, Who can be nominated, Who can nominate and Who can second.

They are set once for the election, not per position. Every seat you added on the previous step is governed by the same four sets, so an election that needs genuinely different rules for two seats is two elections.

The three sets after Who can vote each begin with a Same as voters checkbox, which copies the voter rules rather than making you re-enter them. Who can vote has no such control, because it is the set the others copy.

Each of the four sets combines two kinds of restriction:

• Member types — a checkbox per member type, with the rule stated in place: "Leave all unchecked to include every member type."
• Organizations — a list of rules you build one at a time. Choose Specific organization or Any organization of a type, pick the organization, and press Add rule — it stays disabled until you have chosen one. Each rule then offers Include descendants (org and below), so a region can carry its chapters, and Also include members whose home organization is in this scope: "Members of a board or division keep a home organization — the chapter or region they actually belong to. This only ever adds people." With no rules, "No rules means members of all organizations qualify."

The two filter the same set together, so "these member types, in this region and the chapters under it" is one rule set.

Tenure requirements

Who can be nominated — and only that set — carries a Tenure requirements block of three day counts:

• Min membership days
• Min days in current member type
• Min officer days

"Leave a field empty for no requirement." Use them where your bylaws ask for time served before a member may stand.

One gate sits outside these rules entirely, and the election page states it in its own words: "A nominee also has to hold a member type that can take officer roles — set on the Member Types admin page, and independent of the rules above." Relaxing the eligibility rules will not get around it; that switch is on Member Types.

Review

Review prints the whole election back to you under Details, Positions and Eligibility — including Test election, Who can view, the voting and nomination windows, Seconds required, Campaign (Disabled if you did not enable one), Election type, Win percentage, Run-offs, and each rule set with its member types, organizations and, for nominees, the three tenure lines. Create election is the last thing on the step.

The finished election then repeats the same information on its own page, in a section headed Eligibility & requirements: a first line giving who can view it, then WHO CAN VOTE, WHO CAN BE NOMINATED, WHO CAN NOMINATE and WHO CAN SECOND, each reading Member types: All member types and Organizations: All organizations where you set no restriction, and carrying Same as voters above them where you ticked that box.

Running it

An election moves through the phases you configured: nominations open, candidates accept and post platforms, voting opens, voting closes. Conductors get a Conductor controls card on the election itself. It holds WHO CAN VIEW — the same choice as in the wizard, changeable after the fact, with the reminder that "Viewers follow the election read-only. Whoever can take part always sees it. A test election stays conductor-only whatever is set here." — then Edit while the election can still be changed, View analytics, and Cancel election. A Turnout card beside it gives BALLOTS CAST, ELIGIBLE VOTERS and TURNOUT at a glance.

What View analytics shows

Analytics is four cards under an Analytics · updated <date and time> stamp, and every number in it is an aggregate:

• Turnout — BALLOTS CAST, ELIGIBLE VOTERS, TURNOUT and TIME LEFT, which reads Closed once voting has ended, above the voting window.
• Ballots over time — the voting window plotted, with a line reading "<n> of <n> eligible voters have voted (<n>%)".
• Turnout by organization — one row per organization: ballots over eligible voters, and a percentage.
• Participation by position — per position, the number of candidates, ballots over eligible voters, and a percentage.

There is no voter roster in analytics and no per-member "voted / did not vote" list. Nothing in the election wizard, on the election page or in analytics shows how a named member voted. Elections are secret: fellos shows how a member voted only to that member, on the read-only receipt of their own ballot. If an officer asks you how far ballot secrecy goes, that is the answer — it holds for you as a Site Admin too.

Certifying — where the officers actually change

When voting ends, the election moves to Awaiting certification. This is deliberate: closing the ballot does not move anybody. A conductor confirms the winner for each position and presses Certify results.

A ranked election gives the conductor more to read first. Its election page adds a RESULT (SCHULZE) block listing the candidates in finishing order with winner marked on the first, and a PAIRWISE PREFERENCES table headed prefers ↓ over → showing how each candidate fared against each other one. Both sit on the election page, not in analytics.

The confirmation is blunt, because the action is not reversible: "This places elected officers into their roles. This cannot be undone."

Certifying does three things at once:

• Each winner is placed into the officer role they were elected to.
• The outgoing officer's term in that role is ended.
• Both changes are recorded — in the officer position history on each member's profile, and in the Audit Log.

That is the whole officer transition. There is no follow-up task list, and no admin opening member records one at a time to move titles across, which is exactly where officer lists normally go stale.