Voting4Schools is an excellent solution for school based elections. There are other options out there, but for the price and feature set, V4S is absolutely number 1.

Voting4Schools has grown a lot over the years. The best features are that it allows for timed elections (with pre scheduled start and end times) and that you can create voting groups to specify who can vote in a given election. Pre-flight mode is also extremely useful for testing your election to be sure it’s set up as intended.

There may be a slight learning curve with importing student data, but once you learn how to access your school data in an excel format, and get it loaded into the system, the rest of the process is extremely intuitive.

Voting4Schools has made my job as Student Council advisor so much easier! When I took over the group, voting was done with paper ballots that had to be hand counted. While our student population is not big, the whole process was time-consuming and costly; if a student's name was inadvertently left off a ballot, all the forms had to be recopied and the election re-run, wasting paper and taking away valuable class time. Now, I can simply reset the election and students can vote whether they are in school or not. In addition to the time and cost savings of not running copies, I appreciate the level of security with each student having their own login and only being able to vote once. The only downfall has been cost; many schools in my area run elections through Google Forms because they can do that for free. We have continued to squeeze out the money in our budget for Voting4Schools because of the security and overall ease of use.

- Convenience of voting wherever and whenever - Available app to simplify student voting - Security (individual logins and single-time voting) - Ability to update students in batches - Ease of entry of student information - Ability to copy previous elections to simplify set-up

- Cost is a challenge for our small, rural school (we have no financial support from our school; all funds are generated by Student Council fundraising)

I will continue to use this software as long as the price stays within the budget of my school organization. We take votes of up to 2000 students at a time and so far it has been a time saver.

I like the time savings I have gained compared to when I would hold class elections and count votes by hand. This saves me time and money in the long run.

There are some limitations to the ballot process and I have had some programming error due to getting our school information into the software. How our system sends the student information doesn’t always load error free.

It has freed up a lot of time for us. We have one voting mechanism that ALL elections run through, from club officer elections to teacher of the year voting for the staff. We've used it for everything. The simple fact that I don't have to spend time counting ballots is a time saver. In the first year, I had a couple of instances of needing customer support because something wasn't working just right and I appreciated speaking to a real person in real time and having a quick solution.

Voting4Schools is incredibly easy to set up from the first log in. From loading in our student and staff population to creating, editing, and running elections, the election process is a breeze. The variety of options for setting up the logistics (dates, times, eligible voters, etc) makes it simple to customize each election for a specific group or time period. I can "set it and walk away."

My only dislike is the way we port in passwords. Ours have an @ symbol and sometimes start with a zero. The import mechanism doesn't like either of those. I do spend some time at the beginning of the year editing our file to avoid that, but it also means having to train our kids that THIS is the only thing we use at school with a completely different password.

The main problem or advantage I've been able to solve is accessibility for all students. Especially in today's world (with the pandemic), it's nice to have a trusted platform that will allow me to conduct elections, surveys, etc. with confidence.

I have used voting4schools for 9 years now, and I've always been impressed by their customer service, their regular updates and innovations, and most of all, their dependability. The software was developed by former teachers and that is reflected in its practical application, no-nonsense organization, affordable price point, easy accessibility for students and teachers, and its excellent organization of data. I have looked at a few alternatives, and it's hard to beat a company that does it all so well.

I'm used to it now, but there is a bit of learning curve when it comes to figuring out how to upload names at the beginning of the school year. Also, having to resize pictures (for uploading pictures) can be frustrating, but I'm that may just be on the kids who submit overly large photo sizes.