Eligibility
Who is a member in good standing on the record date? Who is qualified to hold this seat? The rule sits in the bylaws and is enforced by whoever remembers it.
Governance of record for membership associations
Elections your members cannot argue with.
Your bylaws decide who may stand and who may vote. Today that rule lives in one person's head and an email thread. Ballot is online election software that encodes it once, runs the nominations, collects confidential ballots from any phone, and hands you a certified record the day someone challenges the result.
- No card required
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Export everything, any time
Veteran built. Yost Group LLC is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Business.
What you hand the board
- Eligibility
- 1,240 members frozen at scheduling, config hash 9f3a...c1
- Nominations
- 5 received, 4 eligible, 1 ineligible: not an active member
- Consent
- 4 of 4 candidates consented, 4 of 4 seconded
- Notices
- 1,240 invited, 2 reminders, 11 bounces flagged for correction
- Turnout
- 612 accepted ballots, 49.4%. Quorum of 25% met
- Approvals
- Scheduled, closed, and certified by two officers each
Illustrative. Figures are not from a real election.
What a thin record costs you
The seat goes to someone the bylaws disqualify.
Nobody catches it until after the vote, and now the fix is worse than the mistake.
A member challenges the count and you cannot answer.
Who was eligible? Who was notified? What was the quorum? The answers are in three inboxes and one spreadsheet.
You run it again, on your own time.
A rerun costs the board its credibility and costs you the next two months.
The problem
The ballot was never the hard part.
In August 2026 a national veterans association opened its board election by email. Within two days a regional officer had nominated two members, and the person running the election had to write back and explain this seat may only be held by a sitting regional commander. The nominations were withdrawn. Nobody did anything wrong. The rule lived in the bylaws and in one person's head, not in the process.
Small associations run elections on email threads, a member spreadsheet, and the memory of whoever has the job this year. Four failures repeat.
Nomination
Nominations arrive by email. Seconds get lost, consent is assumed, and candidates find out they were nominated after the fact.
Continuity
Who was eligible last year, how notice was given, what the quorum was. When the coordinator changes, the record leaves with them.
Defensibility
A contested result needs a record. Most small organizations cannot produce one.
How it works
Four steps, one record.
Set up your association in an afternoon. Run the same process every year after that.
- 01
Load rules and roster
Import your member CSV, set the eligibility cutoff, and write the candidacy conditions for each seat. The system shows you what it will enforce before anyone is nominated.
- 02
Run nominations with consent
Open a nomination window. Members nominate, seconders confirm, candidates consent, and every determination is recorded. Close the slate with a two-person approval.
- 03
Vote from any device
Each eligible member gets a one-time code at the roster email. The ballot works on a phone in one tap. Reminders reach only the members who have not voted.
- 04
Certify and publish
Reconcile, recompute, and certify with a second officer. Publish to the audience you choose and attach the audit file to the minutes.
What Ballot does
Knowing who may stand, who may vote, and what happened is the product.
Every rule you would otherwise carry in your head is written down once, enforced by the system, and left behind for the next coordinator.
Phase 1
Before the vote
Write the rule down once. The system enforces it every cycle, whoever has the job that year.
Candidacy rules, encoded once
Per-seat conditions checked against roster fields: category, status, current office, group, good standing. Every nomination gets an immediate determination with the rule and the reason in plain language. An ineligible name never reaches a ballot.
Nominations with consent and seconds
The seconder and the candidate each confirm by email link, and the timestamps are kept. No consent, no ballot line. Withdrawals are recorded, not erased.
Eligibility frozen at scheduling
Voter eligibility comes from the approved roster and the cutoff date, then freezes with a hash of the election configuration. The full eligible roster is the turnout denominator. Nobody silently disappears from it.
Phase 2
During the vote
Members vote from a phone in one tap. You watch turnout, not an inbox.
Confidential ballots with receipts
Ballot rows carry no member id, email, IP address, or access token. Each voter gets a random receipt code proving acceptance without revealing choices. Exactly one accepted ballot per member, even under concurrent submissions.
Branded notices, no double sends
Invitations and reminders go out under your name and sender address, previewed and test sent before the first campaign. Reminders reach only members without an accepted ballot and honor suppression lists.
Counting rules made explicit
Single-seat and multi-seat plurality, instant runoff for ranked contests, Yes/No/Abstain questions with a stated threshold and denominator, optional quorum, and write-ins with approval. Ties are never resolved automatically.
Phase 3
After the vote
The part nobody else sells, and the only part a challenge actually touches.
Reconciliation before certification
Participation and ballot counts are reconciled and totals recomputed after close. Certification is blocked on any mismatch or unresolved tie. You cannot certify a number the system cannot stand behind.
An append-only audit trail
Every administrative change and approval, with actor, approver, time, and configuration version. Managers cannot edit it. Auditors can read all of it.
Your data, out whenever you want
A structured PDF certification report for every election: rules, turnout, every contest and round, adjudications, the nomination record, and who certified and published it. Roster, audit trail, and results also export as CSV, and a full offboarding export contains everything your association owns. Ballots export as they are stored: selections with no link to a member.
Two people, every decision that matters
Scheduling, slate close, roster exceptions, deadline changes, certification, publication, and cancellation each require a stated reason and a second authorized person. One account cannot fill both roles. This is the control an auditor asks about first and the one a spreadsheet can never give you.
The difference
The file you can put on the table.
Most tools stop at a tally. A tally is the one thing nobody disputes. What gets disputed is who was allowed to vote, whether the candidate was qualified, whether notice went out, and whether the quorum was met.
Ballot closes every election with a certification report answering all of it, in one document, signed by two officers. Attach it to the minutes and the argument is over before it starts.
Certification reportPDF and CSV
- The eligibility rule as written, and the roster it selected
- Every nomination, second, consent, and withdrawal with timestamps
- Each eligibility determination and the condition it turned on
- Notices sent, reminders sent, bounces flagged
- Counting method, threshold, denominator, and quorum
- Round-by-round tallies for ranked contests
- Every approval, with the two officers and the stated reason
- The configuration hash frozen at scheduling
Positioning
What it is, and what it is not.
Ballot is
- A governance rulebook encoded once and applied every cycle
- A nomination and consent record with automatic eligibility checks
- A confidential ballot with receipts and explicit counting rules
- An audit file a contested member cannot argue with
Ballot is not
- A cheaper ballot-casting tool. Casting ballots is the easy part.
- A board portal with document libraries and meeting minutes
- A government or public-election system
- An anonymity protocol against the people who run the servers
Security
Built so the result can be questioned and still stand.
One-time voter access
Hashed codes and links expiring in minutes, with attempt limits and throttling. No voter passwords.
Ballots without identity
Ballot rows store selections and a date. Nothing links back to a member.
Append-only audit trail
Actor, approver, time, and configuration version on every change. Managers cannot edit it.
Admin MFA and roles
Authenticator-app MFA, distinct manager, certifier, and auditor roles, time-limited sessions.
Pricing
Published prices. Buy what you will use.
No quote call, no seat minimums, no negotiation. If you vote once a year, the single election is the cheaper choice and we say so on the pricing page.
Single election
$122for 250 voters
One charge per scheduled election, priced on the eligible voters frozen at scheduling. Nothing between elections.
Most associations
Annual plan
$230a year
Up to 250 members, unlimited elections, billed as ten months. Larger roster bands are published.
Founding member
50% offfirst term
The first 20 associations, in exchange for a reference call. List price from renewal. Ask for a seat at info@yost.group.
You are not taking the risk here. We are.
- 7 days free with every feature on, and no card to enter.
- A first annual term is refundable for 30 days after activation.
- Monthly plans cancel any time and end at the close of the month.
- Full export of everything your association owns, whenever you ask.
Questions
Frequently asked.
How much work is this to set up?
An afternoon for a first association. Import the member CSV, set the cutoff date, write the candidacy conditions for each seat, and send yourself a test email. The draft election carries a checklist with the next step highlighted, so you never have to guess what is left.
If you would rather hand it off, managed setup and run is a quoted service. Write to info@yost.group.
How does the 7-day trial work?
Every feature is on from the first minute, with no card. Elections scheduled during the trial are capped at 50 eligible voters, which covers a real board or committee vote.
When the trial ends, choose an annual plan, a monthly plan, or a single election. Nothing you configured is lost.
What if we activate and it is not right for us?
A first annual term is refundable within 30 days of activation. If no election opened for voting, you get the full amount back. If one did, we deduct the published single-election price for it and refund the rest. Once per association.
Is pricing per member or per election?
Both are offered. Annual plans are priced by roster size with unlimited elections, from $230 a year. A single election is a base charge plus a per-voter rate on the eligible voters frozen at scheduling: $122 with 250 eligible voters.
See pricing for the bands and worked examples. We do not negotiate discounts, which is why the prices are published.
Do our members need accounts?
No. A member opens the election link, requests a code sent to the email on your approved roster, and votes. Codes expire in minutes and are hashed at rest. No passwords, no profiles.
Can voters see our name and domain, not yours?
Yes. Your logo, colors, and sender name appear on every voter page and email, with each palette checked against WCAG 2.2 AA before it can be saved. Mail is sent from a platform domain with SPF and DKIM aligned by default, or from your own sending domain once its DNS records are verified.
Serving election pages from a domain you own is available on request during setup.
Do you support ranked choice?
Yes, as an optional per-contest method. Single-seat ranked contests are counted by instant runoff with round-by-round tallies in the certification report. Rankings are validated for gaps and duplicates before review and again on the server.
What happens on a tie?
The result is marked unresolved. Ballot never picks a winner by coin flip or by ordering. You apply your bylaws' tie-break by an approved adjudication, or run a separate runoff, and the audit file records which.
Run the next election on the record.
Set up your association in an afternoon. 7 days free, no card required, every feature on.