Every organization has a leadership team – whether that’s headed by a team captain or a club president. And while there are club apps and apps for team management, those don’t really address questions related club voting, let alone team or club roles and responsibilities. They’re more about scheduling events and managing member. The election of club officers remains an unsupported issue.

If your team or club is small you may fill your leadership positions without much to-do. Captains and presidents can be installed by popular acclaim or a show of hands. But in the age of Meetup.com, when small groups can suddenly find themselves with many tens — even many hundreds or thousands — of members, leadership takes on greater responsibility. Club roles and responsibilities change, as do the expectations of a team captain or club president.

Such an evolution suggests a need for more formal nomination and election procedures. You will want to put timelines in place, role descriptions and expectations, rules for nominating candidates. You’ll also want to think about how your team or club members cast their votes.

At some point a show-of-hands vote may become cumbersome — because the votes are too close or because it’s not possible to get all voting members in the same room at the same time to vote or for some other perfectly legitimate reason. You could move to paper ballots, but paper ballot voting presents different pitfalls. Ballots may be damaged or difficult to interpret. They must be counted (and recounted) manually unless you are investing in some kind of ballot scanning technology. It takes time to determine the outcome — and none of your members really want to wait while people count and recount ballots.
Alternatively, you could use an electronic voting system. You can present the voting options on a screen and your members can click a button to cast a vote—which can be captured and tallied immediately. That minimizes the risk that a member’s vote may be damaged or lost, while simultaneously ensuring that the vote results can be presented to members instantly and unambiguously.