The voting challenge of the Italian Bishops’ Conference.
In May, the CEI – Italian Bishops’ Conference – called for streamlining the voting procedure during its General Assembly. In fact, the Assembly had the objective of electing the representative offices, aimed at the proposal of a trio of names, chosen with three sets of votes each to ensure an absolute majority of votes (on the first ballot, on the second, or in the eventual runoff between the two most voted on the second).
The three names would then be presented to Pope Francis for the final decision, as per the paragraph of Article 26 of the Statute of the Italian Bishops’ Conference in effect since 2014: “In view of the special ties of the episcopate of Italy with the Pope, bishop of Rome, the appointment of the president of the Conference is reserved to the Supreme Pontiff, upon the proposal of the General Assembly, which elects, by an absolute majority, a trio of diocesan bishops.”
Because of the importance of the Assembly, held in-person, CEI wanted comprehensive support to digitally manage the set-up and design of the election event.
The solution
The use of the Eligo platform and management by election managers has enabled the entire election process to be significantly refined, hitherto paper-based and in-person. CEI has in fact been able to:
- Create and customize the restricted area and ballots in a few hours.
- Customize the voting area to allow participants to view candidates via video and easily search for the desired candidate.
- Succesfully manage hybrid representative office elections.
- Set up polling with voter registration, with preliminary feedback from the Election Commission in a matter of minutes.
- Conduct a test of the platform with the Election Commission to ensure its efficiency.
Results
Using Eligo during the hybrid representative office elections in attendance has led to concrete and tangible results for CEI:
- Participation: participation in the election was exceptionally high, reaching 96%.
- Sustainability: Use of the platform eliminated the need to print 2250 ballots.
- Time: The time taken to conduct voting was reduced by two days compared to weeks under traditional methods.
- Efficiency: thanks to automatic ballots, 8 hours of counting work were saved.
In addition, from an internal survey, the online voting experience was rated highly. The most appreciated elements and features of the platform were:
- Intuitiveness and simplicity.
- Ease of use.
- Flexibility.
- On-site service and support.
- Timeliness in the entire election process.
