April 19, 2010

This is bonus coverage from “Electronic Voting” from the May 2010 issue of Credit Union Management.

“We have many members that do not live in the area anymore due to transfers and moving because of the hurricanes. We felt electronic voting was the best way for every member to have a chance to vote vs. in-person voting,” says Marketing Manager Lanya Robin, who oversees the electronic voting process at Texas Coastal Community Federal Credit Union.

Texas Coastal Community FCU has worked with the National Credit Union Administration to use its 1999 standard federal credit union bylaws to support a notice of ballot of upcoming electronic elections. (Such a notice of ballot is not allowable for FCUs that have adopted the 2006 standard bylaws) This $24 million CU in Beaumont, Texas, with one branch, 3,300 members and 13 employees held electronic elections in 2008 and 2010. No election was held in 2009.

Once the board decided to move forward with electronic voting, third-party options were reviewed. The CU, however, decided to run the electronic voting in house.

“We could basically do the same thing and not spend any money yet. That way if it didn’t work, nothing was lost,” says Robin. “The way we understood it, the third-party help would still involve us creating lists of eligible members, proving when the votes came in that they were eligible and not duplicated, and the third party would simply receive the votes from us and tally them. We figured, ‘Let’s give it a try first; if it is harder than it sounds we will look elsewhere next time.’”

The CU’s e-voting is done through members e-mailing their vote along with their member number to a secure credit union e-mail address. That e-mail ballot’s member number is then verified against a printed member report and marked off on the report. The vote is then printed and put into a ballot box for the supervisory committee to count.

Voting members receive an e-mail reply with these standard responses: “Your vote has been received,” “Your vote has been denied due to a duplicate member number,” or “Your vote has been denied because the member number was not included.”

The results of the CU’s electronic voting are announced on its Web site and through paper mailings.

Robin says the CU is still perfecting its electronic voting process. Since the credit union is small, she says it only has enough equipment for employees to manage the ballot process. But the CU is working toward having the supervisory committee directly handle the ballots.

Robin says members are still adapting to the electronic voting feature. “We have had a few members who are worried about their privacy and the fact that their e-mail address can be linked to them and, therefore, the votes are not anonymous. We are working on that, but no matter what we have to verify that the votes come from members who are 18 and older, and that the member only votes once,” says Robin.

In this year’s 2010 election, votes at Texas Coastal Community FCU included 29 paper ballots and 174 electronic ballots. Robin says the CU saw at least double the number of electronic votes for this second election.

Jessica Whitmore is a free-lance writer based in Pennsylvania.