Basic Timeline

  • October 16, 2024: Online ballot system available for testing
  • October 29, 2024: Last day of testing for online ballot. Closes at 3pm.
  • October 30, 2024: Student Vote!
    • 3:40 p.m.: Polls close
    • Between 3:45 and 4:00 p.m.: Results made public

When can we start testing the online vote system?

October 16th! Every school vote coordinator will be emailed information about how to access the Student Vote system. For schools that submit more than one coordinator, the message will be sent to the first person listed.

Where do we log in?

REMEMBER: The login/password provided is only for getting results at LPS schools as students will use their personal logins/passwords to actually vote. You will need a student or two to do the testing. At non-LPS schools, the provided password also activates the voting station for students to vote.

You must vote first before viewing results. The results page will show an error if no votes have been cast.

What should we be testing?

I would verify the following:

  1. Are you able to login and vote?
  2. Does the system work?
  3. When you view your results, are they accurately reported?
  4. Repeat the process enough that you feel comfortable with it.
    You don’t want to be familiarizing yourself with how the system works on October 20th.

If you are able to have a class in your school attempt to vote one class period, that would be best. It would best simulate a vote-day environment at your school. Just be sure that you have each student tell you who they voted for so that you can compare that against what the system says your results are. You could even give each student directions on who to vote for so that they didn’t feel pressured for this test to say who they are voting for — label any such directions as “for testing purposes only” to avoid misinformation indicating that students were being told how to vote.

Login Procedures

Students at LPS schools will be required to login with their student id and password to vote. This will restrict voting to one vote per student. If LPS students were to login a second time, they would only be overwriting their past vote and not casting a new one. Because this is tied into the LPS student user database, I can only offer this feature to LPS schools.

Non-LPS schools will each be given a single login/password that a staff member can use to activate terminals (just like it has been done in the past) and students will be able to use those terminals to vote.

What Do You Need?

Different schools have done this in different ways, so I’m not going to give you a procedure that I think you should follow, but here is what is required.

  1. Internet-connected computers (Chromebooks, Mac, Win, Linux, iPhone, Android, doesn’t matter).
  2. A controlled environment at locations where you are using a single sign-on such as non-LPS schools. In these locations, students could potentially vote multiple times if they were left un-monitored at a voting terminal that was logged into the voting system. This is exactly how student vote has always been in the past, so whatever you’ve been doing – keep it up. 😉