A secret ballot for your group. (Not an election platform.)
Invited voters, one ballot each, and nobody can see who chose what, including you. You can choose Ranked Choice or regular voting, too. Nothing for anyone to install or sign up for, and the whole thing runs from the phones already in their pockets.
How a vote goes
A board seat, a club president, the name of the new boat. Anything your group decides by ballot, it can decide tonight.
Tonight
You write the question and the names
One question, the choices, and a list of who gets a ballot: names and emails. That list is the whole security model. If you are not on it, there is no ballot for you.
When you open it
Every voter gets one link by email
Each ballot is its own private link. There is no public page to forward around, so there is no way to vote twice and no way to vote for someone else. If someone loses their email, you can send that one person a fresh link.
While it's open
People vote from wherever they are
Tap the link, mark the ballot, done! Rank the choices if you set it up that way. Nobody creates an account. Nobody sees anyone else's ballot, and that includes the organizer: the ballots are hidden from you too.
When it closes
The names are separated from the answers, for good
You get the count, or the ranked result. What you never get is who voted which way. That separation is permanent, which is the part people ask about, and the part that lets a group vote honestly about each other.
When might you need an election platform?
Shatuga Vote Chooser is built for the vote that a club, a congregation, a co-op, a student group or a small board holds a few times a year, where the hard part was never counting; it was making sure everyone trusted the count.
Some votes need more than trust inside the group. If your bylaws say every voter must prove who they are, if members can hand their vote to a proxy, or if an outside auditor has to be able to check the count afterwards, that is the job an election platform is built for.
It is not an election platform. There is no identity verification beyond the email you listed, no proxy voting, and no cryptographic proof you can hand an auditor. If your bylaws need those, you need one of the services built for that, and we are glad they exist.
What it costs
Ballots go out by email, and sending email is the one thing at Shatuga with a price. Your first 200 ballots are on us. After that, $20 covers the next 10,000, which is a great many votes. Chooser itself, the app the vote runs in, is free, with no ads and no subscription.
Shatuga is a very small company. Here's Mars, the person behind it, in case you want to put a face to the otter.
Set up your vote.
It opens in Chooser with the secret-ballot settings already on. You will need a free Chooser account to send the ballots; your voters will not.
