In this article we will take a comprehensive look into how to set up your voters in NemoVote. There is some overlap to our article on "User Management" in NemoVote and this article. For the purpose of this article we will not go into the basic functions of the User Management (such as access levels) but will discuss the usecase that you have an empty instance of NemoVote and want to fill it with voters, so that you can start voting quickly.
General considerations and onboarding strategies
One important question that you need to consider is if you want to add email addresses to each voter account or not. The unique identifier of a voter (or administrator) in NemoVote is the username. Every username can exist only once within NemoVote. This means that every voter needs to have a username. Setting up an email address is optional.
As the username is the unique identifier, it is possible to link several voter accounts (or admin accounts) to the same email address!
We highly recommend to consider having an email linked to every account in NemoVote to enable password reset.
Now to the different strategies for voter onboarding. There are 3 ways to add voters in NemoVote.
- Add voters manually through the User Management
- Upload voters in bulk through the "add multiple voters" function in the User Management
- Let voters sign up themselves through the sing up function We explain the option 1. in our article about the User Management in more detail. In the following we will explain the upload of multiple voters
Upload multiple voters
This is the most commonly used way to onboard many voters in NemoVote. All you need is the email addresses of everyone that should be set up as a voter.
The upload function allows you to upload as many users as you want with a simple copy and paste from a spread sheet software (e.g. Excel, Numbers etc.). The process works like this you copy the voter details from your spread sheet software in to NemoVote; then NemoVote will automatically recognise the information; once you confirmed the upload, NemoVote will generate secret passwords for each voter. You then can chose to send the login credentials directly via email to all voters or skip that step and let NemoVote send them later.
You can access the tool by clicking the button shown above that is situated in the User Management. This will lead you to the following page, where the voter upload will happen.
Currently, the upload tool supports uploading the following voter information:
- Username
- Displayname
- Vote weighting: Therefore you need to set the checkbox to "Show advanced template". This will enable you to set a vote weight on the individual voter basis using a number and directly add that vote weight when uploading the voters
We will explain in the tutorial below how to upload voters into NemoVote from Microsoft Excel.
Video tutorial upload function
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Credential Email
Once you send a credential email they will be delivered the domain name of your cloud (URL), their username and their initial password via email to the email that is set for them in the user management.
Troubleshooting: Did some voters not receive their credentials? Please ask them to check their spam folder. We use a very reliable and industry leading mail delivery service, that is compliant with the GDPR European Data Privacy Regulations but it is still possible that due to the way some mail providers set up their spam filters that some of the credential mails may end up in spam.
This is what the credential email will look like to the voter in they mail program. For purposes of the screenshot we anonymized the password and the cloud name.
You can edit the content and email subject of the email. We explain this in this article:
Sign up
What about the sign up then? NemoVote has a sign up functionality that allows all persons with the link to the cloud to create a voter account (assigning a username and password to themselves). This is useful for organisations/events that do not have a voter registry of all voters and want people to create their on voting accounts. This function is natively disabled in NemoVote. Should you need access to that function, please contact our support at team@nemovote.com to get it enabled.