Success Stories & “AaHaa!” Moments

How can we quickly tabulate our association election results when not every delegate carries the same weight?


A national association traditionally spent at least two days to elect association officers and vote on policy referendums for the association during their annual meeting.

Over 1000 association members from throughout the country attended and each member had a vote that could represent anywhere from one to several thousand delegates. This entire voting process was completed with a pencil and paper ballot!

Counting the votes during their general session was a long and tedious process that sometimes took more than one hour to complete a single vote. The process also required a small army of individuals to collect the paper ballots for counting and collating. At that point, the votes were put into a report and then delivered to the conference chairman to be presented to the members.

An enormous amount of time was wasted during this process, which cost the association thousands of dollars in facility rental time alone, not to mention the high cost for the personnel to complete the process.

The association approached Meridia Audience Response for a solution to their problem.


THE ISSUES
1. Reduce the time it takes to vote for officers
2. Provide a method to easily modify statements in the constitution, and re-vote if a change is needed
3. Increase the accuracy of the vote counts while including a weighted vote count customized to each keypad

The Meridia system was not only capable of voting but was able to assign a weight to each individual vote to accurately represent the many votes each delegate brought to the process.

This drastically reduced the voting time and--with the “Weighted Voting” feature--maintained accurate representation during the voting process.

As a result, the entire voting process was reduced to less than 5 hours! Throughout the day, the Meridia system was inspected and approved by one of the top accounting companies in the US and accuracy was checked several times. In every situation, the Meridia staff and the technical integrity of the RSVP system came through with flying colors.

By using Meridia’s service, the association saved thousands of dollars in room fees and reduced their anxiety level to a minimum during the entire election.