Voting As Discussion And Decision

Most voting tools assume someone decides the options before voting opens. Two settings here let you drop that assumption: voters can add options during the vote, and voters can change their ballot until it closes. Each is useful alone. Together they turn a ballot into a working discussion — proposals appear, people see them, and earlier voters revise.

Adding options while the vote runs

Turn on Allow Write-In Candidates in the Contest Rules panel and each voter gets one write-in per contest: a name, and optionally a description. It is added immediately — no approval step — and other voters can rank it from that moment on.

Write-in votes count. A write-in is added to the contest's candidate list on equal footing with the options you listed yourself, and the count treats it identically. There is nothing to promote or approve afterwards.

Why you don't see every write-in

Each voter sees a limited number of other people's write-ins — Maximum Visible Write-Ins, five by default. This is deliberate, and worth explaining to your voters, because a ballot that shows a different set than a neighbor's looks like a bug when it isn't.

Two reasons. A ballot listing forty write-ins is unusable. And showing every voter the same first few write-ins would hand whoever arrived earliest a permanent advantage — everyone would rank them simply because they were visible.

So the selection is scored, taking account of popularity (how many voters have ranked it so far), recency of addition, and a random component. Popular proposals surface, recent ones still get a hearing, and no single write-in monopolises every ballot. If the write-ins all fit inside the limit, everyone sees all of them.

Two details that matter in practice. Your own write-in is always shown to you, and never counts against the limit. And if you are voting through a personal link, the random component is fixed to your link — reloading the page will not deal you a different hand, so nobody can fish for a better set.

Nothing is actually hidden, though. The write-in box searches the full list as you type: enter the first few letters and every existing proposal that starts with them appears, whether or not it was among the five on your ballot. Pick one and it joins your ballot ready to rank — you don't retype it and you don't create a second copy. (Typing the exact name of something already on your ballot simply tells you so; it's already there to rank.) So the limit governs what the ballot displays, not what you can reach — which is why it's worth typing a word or two before adding something.

Changing your vote

Turn on Allow voters to change their vote and a voter holding their receipt can submit a replacement ballot at any time until the election closes. It replaces the original rather than adding to it — one voter, one ballot, throughout. The link is between the receipt and the ballot, and the receipt is anonymous.

Usually voters won't need to dig the receipt out. The browser they voted on remembers it, so returning to the election on the same browser recognises them and offers to change their vote directly; the receipts page lists every election that browser has voted in. That convenience is deliberately fragile, though — it doesn't survive clearing browser data, a private window, or moving to another device, and kiosk-style elections skip it entirely. So the receipt is still the real credential, and worth telling voters to keep: on a different device, without it, they cannot revise.

Whether a returning voter sees their old ballot depends on a second option: Allow voters to view their own ballots after casting. With it on, their previous rankings are pre-filled and every candidate they had ranked is shown again even if it would otherwise have fallen outside the visible write-in limit, so a revision never silently drops something they had already chosen. With it off, the receipt proves they voted but not how — deliberately, since a receipt that reveals a vote can be demanded by someone buying or coercing it — and a returning voter starts from a blank ballot.

That makes the two settings worth deciding together. Vote changing without ballot viewing means anyone revising has to reconstruct their whole ranking from memory, which for a long ballot is enough friction that most won't bother. If you want the discussion pattern below to work, turn both on.

A vote that is also the discussion

Turn both on and the character of the exercise changes. The option set is no longer something you have to get right in advance; it's discovered by the people voting. Someone proposes a venue nobody had considered, others see it, and the people who voted on Monday come back on Wednesday to move it up.

This suits any decision where the best answer might not be on anyone's list at the start: where to hold the offsite, which projects to fund, what to name the thing, which night works. It suits it considerably better than a poll where the organiser guessed the options.

A few things make it work better:

Say that it's happening. Voters who don't know they can add options won't. One line — "add your own suggestion, and come back later to see what others proposed" — is the difference between a poll and a discussion.

Tell people when the ballot has changed. Run Election → Notify your voters grows a Notify: New Candidates button once write-ins exist and voting is open. It defaults to emailing only the people who have already voted, which is exactly right — they're the ones whose ballots predate the new options. That one email is what turns a vote into a conversation; without it, early voters never learn there is anything to come back for.

Use descriptions. For projects, policies, or dates — anything that isn't a person's name — a bare label rarely conveys the proposal. The description field is what lets someone else evaluate it.

Leave enough time. A vote that closes in an hour cannot have a discussion in it. Proposals need time to be seen and ranked.

A rough edge worth knowing

The write-in box's search helps when you start typing something that already exists. But it matches on opening letters only, so it cannot catch the same idea proposed under a different name — "Fix the playground" and "Renovate the play equipment" have nothing in common to match on, and neither do "Bob Smith" and "Robert Smith". The count treats them as rivals and splits support that should have been combined.