Tournament Director eBallot Guide
As a tournament director, we are very excited to be rolling out an eBallot solution available for your tournaments. eBallots should hopefully save you a lot of time, paper, and keep your tournament on schedule since judges will no longer have to walk back to the judge's table to turn in ballots.
Implementing eBallots at your tournament is quite straightforward and requires very little work on your part. You can successfully use eBallots at your tournament through the following X steps.
Step 1 - Enable eBallots
Since eBallots are a new feature, you currently have to enable them at your tournament. Go to the Setup->Tab settings page and click on the Tournament Settings section. On the ballots tab you will just click 'use eBallots' and click the update button.
This will then enable a few new pages and features on the site which will enable you to use eBallots.
Step 2 - Confirm Judge Preferences
eBallots was implemented in such a way that you can always "fall back" to paper ballots if something isn't working well with eBallots. You will want to confirm each judge's ballot preference is set to either text or email. All judges default to "paper" as their preference unless their coach has setup a valid email or phone number to receive eBallots.
If any judges are set to paper, you'll need to get a valid email or phone number and edit the judge entry. You can update their email/phone and ballot preference.
Step 3 - Push eBallot Notifications
Just as you would print out ballots on paper from the Pair/Section->Ballots page, you can send out eBallot notifications from there as well. Select the schedule block and events you want to send eBallots for and then click on the 'eballots' button rather than the screen or PDF buttons.
This will generate eBallot notifications for all judges who have a text or email preference set. The program will queue up the notifications which are sent out within the minute. Judges will receive a message either through text or email that alerts them that they have a ballot.
The notification contains a link they need to click on to accept the ballot. You can monitor the status of judges accepting their eBallots on the eBallot status page. The status page will also allow you to send new notifications to judges if you find out the original notification went to the wrong number or email.
If a judge does not accept their eBallot within three minutes, they will receive a follow up notification asking them to please click on the link or their ballot may be pushed.
If five minutes pass without accepting their ballot, they will receive a notice that the Tournament Director has been notified that the eBallot has not been accepted and the ballot may be pushed. You will then receive a notification.
You can then push the ballot from the change judges page. If the judge who you push the ballot to has set their ballot preference to text or email, they will then receive a notification of a ballot assignment and have 5 minutes to accept it as well.
Paper Preference?
If you are running a tournament that mixes both traditional paper ballots along with eBallots, you can proceed with printing ballots as usual. Normally, when you have enabled eBallots, any judges who have their ballot preference to text or email, will be skipped when printing out paper ballots. However, you can force paper ballots for all judges by clicking on the advanced menu and toggling the "Paper Ballots For All Judges" option
This will force printing paper ballots for all judges. If this toggle is set to off, then only judges who have their ballot preference set to paper will be included in the ballot printing.
Step 4 - Results
Each judge will be able to record the results for each of their rounds. You can view the status of the ballots using the same missing ballots page from the Tab->Missing Ballots page.
In the event something odd happens (such as a no show in IEs or a double-loss in debate), the program will direct the judge to contact you as the tournament director. You can then handle the unexpected result using the traditional tab->record ballots page. eBallots were designed to work on top of the original tab system.