Sealed ballots and digitally locked election results ensure that no one sees sensitive results too...
Comment Vote adds a missing layer to secure online elections: a digital protocol directly in the voting system. Election managers and organizers can document irregularities, roll-call changes or technical incidents right at the vote – time-stamped, user-bound, and immutable.
Chapters
- (TL;DR) Short and sweet
- Why comments matter in legally safe online voting
- How Comment Vote works in NemoVote
- GO! example: when bylaws require comments
- Typical use cases in real elections
- Comment Vote as part of the digital election record
- Conclusion: more traceability, more confidence
Short and sweet
In many organisations, legally safe online voting is not only about the final result, but also about how you can document what happened during the vote itself. Who was present, who left, which irregularities were reported – all of this matters for traceability and protection against challenges.
With Comment Vote, NemoVote adds a structured way for admins and organisers to add comments to a vote, after the voting process. Comments are time-stamped, linked to the person who made them, and cannot be edited or deleted. This turns the voting system into a digital election protocol instead of a pure “black-box result”.
Why comments matter in legally safe online voting
From a legal and compliance perspective, it is not enough to know what the result of a vote was. For challenge-proof online elections, you also need to be able to show how the election was conducted: who was allowed to vote, which irregularities occurred, and how they were handled.
In the analogue world, this information usually lives in handwritten minutes or a separate protocol. In online elections, however, this creates a gap: the voting system knows the numbers, while the context sits somewhere else. If you want full traceability of the voting process, you need both in one place.
Comment Vote closes this gap by bringing structured comments directly into the election system. This improves the traceability of the voting process and supports protection against challenges when decisions are scrutinised later on.
How Comment Vote works in NemoVote
Comment Vote is intentionally simple to use and strict in how it records information.
Who can add comments?
- Admins and organizers (election managers) with the respective permission can add comments to a vote.
- This is configurable per election, so only the roles that should document the process can do so.
What does a comment look like?
- Comments are time-stamped and linked to the user who created them.
- They are immutable: once submitted, a comment cannot be edited or deleted.
- There are no categories – comments are free text, to stay flexible and fast.
Where are comments visible?
- Comments appear live in the admin “Results” view for all authorised admins and organisers of that election.
- They are included in the PDF result export, forming part of the official election documentation.
- They do not appear in the presenter mode, so they are not projected to the entire room.
How fast can you add a comment?
- Adding a comment takes just a few seconds: two clicks – “Add comment” and “Submit”.
- This makes it realistic to document events even in fast-paced, in-room or hybrid meetings.
GO! example: when bylaws require comments
The initial version of Comment Vote existed as an idea and prototype very early in NemoVote’s history – but it stayed on the bench for years. It became a priority when our customer GO! onderwijs van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap requested it as a bylaw requirement for their elections.
GO!’s bylaws require election managers to document any irregularities directly in the election record – for example when one delegate accuses another of fraud, when eligibility is questioned, or when other issues arise during the vote. For their legal and compliance teams, this documentation is a crucial part of the election, not a “nice to have”.
As Isabel from GO! put it:
Typical use cases in real elections
Beyond the GO! implementation, Comment Vote opens up several practical use cases for legally safe online voting.
Presence and roll-call changes
- “Delegate X left the room at 14:03.”
- “Delegate X rejoins at 14:07 and is participating again.”
This helps explain why vote counts or quorums may have changed between motions, and it supports roll-call based documentation when needed.
Irregularities and objections
- Recording that a delegate raised an objection or alleged irregularity during a specific vote.
- Documenting how the chair or election committee decided to handle the situation (e.g. repeating a vote).
Missing or incorrect voters (non-secret votes only)
- If a voter was accidentally not uploaded to the voter list in a non-secret vote, their choice can be documented in the comment field.
- If a person was given voting rights by mistake, this can be noted so that the impact on the result is transparent – especially when the single vote does not change the outcome.
Repeated or proxy votes
- “Vote repeated at 15:12 due to connection issue, as decided by the chair.”
- “Changed proxy right from delegate X to delegate Y.”
Comment Vote as part of the digital election record
Comment Vote is not meant to replace your full meeting minutes. But it is a key building block of the digital election record inside NemoVote.
- Ballots and results show what was decided.
- Quorums, timestamps and seals show when and under which conditions the vote took place.
- Comment Vote adds context on what happened during the vote – directly tied to the election itself.
Together, this turns NemoVote from a pure voting engine into a documented decision process. For legal teams and compliance officers, this improves the traceability of the voting process and supports greater resilience against formal challenges.
Interaction with Sealed Voting
Comment Vote works hand in hand with NemoVote’s Sealed Voting feature:
- In sealed elections, comments are recorded but only visible once the seal is broken.
- When the authorised person opens the seal, they see both the result and the full comment history for that vote.
This means that even in highly sensitive elections, you can keep the results protected until the right moment – while still having a complete, time-stamped log of all relevant events surrounding the vote.
Conclusion: more traceability, more confidence
Comment Vote is a small feature with a big impact for legal and compliance teams. It gives election managers the ability to document irregularities, presence changes and decisions inside the voting system – not just in separate minutes.
By combining sealed results, secure voting, and an immutable comment history, NemoVote strengthens both the traceability of online elections and the confidence of everyone involved. If your bylaws or governance standards require a documented election process, Comment Vote is the missing piece that turns digital voting into a truly challenge-ready solution.