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, plus optional nomination and campaign periods. Only the periods you configure appear on the member-facing timeline.

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 and review

The Eligibility step is where you set who may vote and who may be nominated, and whether nominations need seconding. Review shows the whole thing back to you before Create election.

Running it

An election moves through the phases you configured: nominations open, candidates accept and post platforms, voting opens, voting closes. Conductors get controls on the election itself — Edit while it can still be changed, Cancel election, and a View analytics view once voting is under way.

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.

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 — on member profiles under Officer Position History, 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.