Want to take your election online? Here’s what you need to know…
School boards are able to choose whether to run their election as an electronic election or a paper-based election.
However, if you want to run an electronic election, the Education (Board Elections) Regulations state that you MUST use a provider that has been accredited by the Ministry of Education, and don’t stress… Election Pilot is fully accredited.
In fact, we are the only provider that has been continuously accredited since electronic elections were introduced in 2022.
Is an electronic election right for you?
We are big fans of electronic elections for several reasons:
Your data accuracy will probably be better for online elections
Most schools and kura are communicating with their community electronically. Often the only time you capture a postal address is when a student enrols with you, and if the family moves during that time, they often don’t update the postal address with the kura, especially if they have moved out of zone. But if parents stop getting emails from the school, they are pretty quick to get that updated.
Electronic elections are easier for voters
Most parents are time-poor these days. Remembering to fill in the voting form and get it back to school or in the post is often not a high priority for parents. Electronic voting can be done anytime that is convenient to them, on any device and is available in multiple languages. There is no need to create an account or log in; voters just click the personalised link in their email, and they are taken right to your election.
Electronic elections can lift engagement
We saw the first increase in engagement in many years in the 2025 triennial elections. We had more candidates than ever before, more parent elections went to a vote and a higher voter turnout. We also believe that these increases in engagement rates weren’t seen in school board elections run by the other accredited provider or in schools and kura that ran their own paper-based elections. We put this down to the ease of use with our new voting platform.
Paper-based elections can exclude voters
If you are running a paper-based election and you don’t have current postal addresses for your parents, they get excluded from the election. When you post out voting papers, it currently costs $2.90 to post. If the family has moved or the address is wrong, the voting pack is returned to the sender and that $2.90 is wasted. Even worse, as that person didn’t receive their voting pack, they are now not able to vote in your election. With electronic elections, the email addresses are much more accurate, and if a parent has changed their email address, we can change this in the voter record and re-send them a voting link, which can’t be done in postal elections.
What happens if some of our community members don’t have an email address?
This isn’t a problem at all… We will automatically post nomination and voting packs to people for whom we don’t have an email address, so an electronic election is really a hybrid election. No one is excluded.
We do recommend that schools and kura check their data in the lead up to an election and contact those parents you don’t have an email address for, hopefully there are only a few. It’s a great opportunity to let them know you will be running an election, and they may have an email address you can use. If they don’t, check that the postal address you have is current and let them know that they will be getting voting packs in the post during the election.
How do we know electronic elections are accurate, or if voters’ personal information is safe?
This is the reason why electronic school board elections have to be run by accredited providers… We have had to go through a very thorough process with the Ministry of Education to show that we have appropriate systems and controls in place to protect private information, limit who has access to the information and take all reasonable steps to ensure data breaches can’t occur.
Part of the accreditation process was a requirement to get an assessment by Safer Technology 4 Schools (ST4S). ST4S is an independent assessor that is owned by the NZ and Australian ministries and departments of education. The assessment is specific to schools and kura in NZ and AU and sets a minimum standard for cybersecurity in an education setting. You can find out more about the ST4S system from the Ministry of Education. You can also verify an ST4S badge on the ST4S badge register. At Election Pilot, we have taken the Ministry accreditation as a minimum standard, and we have quite a few additional security and safety features that go over and above the minimum requirements.
There are also some things that our system has been built to do specifically to make sure that the integrity of an election is a first priority. For example, the Election Pilot staff have no way of seeing who has voted or for whom someone has voted. An electronic election is more likely to be accurate as it doesn’t allow for human error or influence in counting votes, and any possible changes are recorded, leaving an audit trail, making tampering almost impossible.
