The Election Committee
Who runs your elections, what the role can do, and how to appoint the people who hold it.
Elections are run by the Election Committee — the people your association chooses to conduct them, outside the officers. Nobody who is standing in an election should be the one counting it, so the officers (Administrator, Treasurer, Financial Secretary) cannot run elections at all unless you also give them this role.
How it works
The Election Committee is a role, like Treasurer. Everyone who holds it is still an ordinary member — they vote, they can nominate themselves — and they also get the powers to run an election:
| Power | What it lets them do |
|---|---|
| Create and manage elections | Create, change and delete elections and their positions, and cancel an election. |
| Manage candidates | Put candidates forward, and approve or reject nominations. |
| Open and close the stages | Open and close nominations and voting. |
| See results early | Read the results as soon as voting closes, before they are published. |
| Publish results | Make the results visible to every member. |
| Manage polls | Create, start, close and cancel polls. |
| Set the voting rules | Choose who can vote and who can stand — see Who can vote and who can stand. The Administrator can do this too. |
The Administrator keeps the power to run polls — a poll is a quick question, not an election — to appoint the committee and to set the association's usual voting rules, but not to run elections.
Nobody decides their own nomination
If a committee member is also standing, another member of the committee has to approve or reject their nomination. The screen tells them so instead of showing the buttons.
Appoint the committee
They need to sign out and back in once to see the new section. On the web it appears in their sidebar as Election Committee; on the phone it appears under Manage → Voting.
You can also build a smaller role that holds only some of these powers — see Creating custom roles. A role that can only publish results, for example, is a way to let the chair sign off an election that others ran.
Why it matters
Keeping the people who count the votes apart from the people who might win them is what makes an election believable. The committee can see the results before anyone else, which is why those results are never shown to the officers or members until the committee publishes them.
What you can do
Related
Assigning and removing roles
Give a person a role, or take one away, from the Users page.
How an election runs, start to finish
The stages an election moves through, from Draft to Results Published, and who can take each step.
Creating custom roles
Build a role with exactly the permissions it needs, beyond the built-in roles.
Last updated 28 October 2026