An electoral officer is not administrative help.

What we do, and why it is a separate job

In most organisations the vote is run by the same people whose positions, budgets or decisions are being voted on. Usually that is fine, because nobody objects. The difficulty arrives on the day somebody does — and then the question is not whether the count was right, but whether anyone independent can say so.

We are engaged by the organisation, we preside over the vote, and we produce the record. We have no view on the outcome and no stake in it. That is the entire value, and everything else we do exists to make it demonstrable.

How we work

We record the meeting rules and instructions in writing before the notice goes out, because a threshold argued about at 19:40 in a full room is a threshold nobody will agree on. We record quorum continuously rather than once. Our audit controls prevent meeting users and operators from rewriting the record afterwards. And we write the report for the member most likely to dispute it, not for the client who commissioned it.

The software

We built our own platform because the alternatives could not answer the questions a disputed vote produces — most obviously “was the meeting quorate at the moment that resolution carried”, which requires having written the answer down at the time.

It is a tool we operate. Clients do not licence it, learn it or administer it; that is our job, and it is included in the engagement.