We do all the hard work
When we are the Returning Officer for your election we handle pretty much everything.
Our system will integrate with your Student Management System (SMS) to generate the electoral roll automatically, we provide a bunch of resources for your school or kura, manage the call for nominations, approving candidates, candidate queries, issue voting papers, count the votes, declare the results and complete the required reporting to the Ministry.
All your team need to do is help us get the SMS integration set up at the beginning, include some template notices in your newsletter, school app, etc., and then publish the results to your community at the end.
You can offer electronic voting and get better turn out
If you want to offer electronic voting, you MUST use a provider that has been accredited by the MoE, which we are.
In the 2025 triennial elections, we saw the first significant increase in engagement of school board elections in over 20 years (and we believe these increases were not seen in elections run by the other accredited provider or in paper-based elections run by schools).
2025 saw the number of parent elections with enough candidates to trigger the election to progress to the voting stage increase from approximately 50% of elections in previous years to 73.8% of all parent elections going to a vote.
We also saw the voter return increase from 18-20% in previous elections to 28.9% in 2025.
Voter turnout in staff elections increased to 69.6% and student elections to 39.5%, both improvements over previous elections.
Your election will be truly independent
When you appoint Election Pilot to be your Returning Officer, your election is truly independent.
This removes the possibility of people complaining that someone in the school or kura influenced or interfered with your election.
It frees up your team to focus on the important things… the students
Elections take time to be done correctly, and for most people, this is not something they do all the time.
It takes time to get up to speed with the rules and to manage the process properly.
We do all that for you so your team can focus on the important work that needs to happen in your school or kura.
School board election requirements in New Zealand
State and State-Integrated schools and kura in New Zealand are required to hold elections for their school board every three years (the next triennial elections will be in 2028).
Schools and kura with students at Year 9 and above also need to hold an election for a student board member every year in September.
Additionally, some schools hold mid-term elections 18 months after the triennial elections, and schools may need to hold by-elections at any time during the three-year period if a board member resigns.
All school board elections need to follow the rules in the Education and Training Act 2020 and the Education (Board Elections) Regulations 2022
and the Returning Officer must follow the process in the legislation.At Election Pilot, we are always running elections for NZ schools (we run a lot of by-elections for schools and kura, so we pretty much always have an election underway apart from over the summer holidays). This means this is what we do every day, and we know the rules inside out.
Boards have been able to use electronic voting since the 2022 triennial election, with one very important condition: Regulation 8 states that boards MUST appoint or engage an accredited provider for parent and staff electronic elections. Election Pilot is the only provider that has been continuously accredited since electronic elections started in 2022!
