Now more than ever, the collective voice of architects is essential for designing a better future for our planet. For over a century, The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has been committed to providing architects with the resources they need to do their best work. To secure informed and fair elections of their Board members, AIA used VPOLL’s survey feature. During a three-day event, the voting members could log in to VPOLL and cast their vote for three different board members.

With several years of experience using a proprietary program, their switch to VPOLL was guided by the need for a more efficient solution to account for weighted votes. VPOLL can accommodate the weighting of each delegate’s vote and thus provide an all-in-one solution for their election needs.  AIA staff no longer has to use their own proprietary program to apply the weightings.

Today, the AIA uses both the survey feature and live polling sessions with the help of Vistacom’s staff for operation and support. Each year they deploy VPOLL for various requirements: the election of Board members, Strategic Council elections, and the selection of awards.

Pam Day, Corporate Secretary and Vice President for Governance and Awards, took the time to tell us how they use VPOLL.

‍

"It's extremely beneficial that VPOLL’s survey feature works on multiple devices. Delegates can quickly and easily access the site and vote. We no longer have to create separate systems to allocate our weighted vote system for Board elections."

‍

Smooth running of elections was down to VPOLL’s user-friendly interface that helped to minimize distractions and accommodate key features:

‍

Voter Authentication. Credentials are only provided to voting members. To ensure voting integrity, they must log in to VPOLL with their unique ID numbers.

‍

Required Majority. The AIA voting structure is comprised of chapters and each chapter has a certain number of votes that are distributed to voting members in attendance. After taking attendance, each chapter’s weighted vote was redistributed among those representatives that were present. For example, AIA Bylaws require that ¾ of the accredited votes be present to establish a quorum and proceed with the business of the meeting. VPOLL’s required majority feature automatically calculated the 3/4 required majority number and as soon as the question was closed, AIA staff could immediately determine if there was a quorum present.

‍

Proxy votes. Not every chapter could attend but they still needed to provide their vote. VPOLL’s proxy vote feature allowed other delegates in attendance to vote on behalf of a few chapters that were not present. Furthermore, VPOLL accommodated the weighted votes that those chapters carried.

‍