An eligibility list is a list of students who are able to see and vote in a ballot, allowing you to individualize the group of voters for particular ballots within your election. This allows you to restrict voting to particular classes, groups, or individuals. Only campus administrators can access, update, and create eligibility lists for elections, however they can allow certain organizations to utilize them in their organization elections.
After logging into the site, access the Admin view of your Switchboard.
From the Elections drop-down list in the top, select the Eligibility Lists option under the Settings header.
Clicking Create Eligibility List will bring you to a page where you can craft your list with a name and a brief description of the eligibility list. The description field is optional.
Next, indicate if the eligibility list should be assigned only to a specific organization. By default, No is selected. Select the appropriate organization by typing the name in the box next to Organization, if applicable. If no Organization is assigned, the eligibility list will only be accessible in campus wide elections.
Select the "Type of File" (either usernames or email addresses) from the drop-down menu. Click Choose File to browse for the CSV (comma delimited) file containing the usernames or e-mail addresses to upload.
The cap for this upload would be 10,000 users, but we encourage you to use fewer to ensure successful processing of your file. Make sure to remove any duplicates from your file before uploading it, as duplicate email addresses or usernames will not be processed, resulting in those users not being included in the eligibility list. You can check the Imports tab to insure that all rows in your import were successful.
When you're finished, simply hit Save. You are now ready to create an Election and apply eligibility lists to your ballots! To learn more about creating an election, and configuring the usage of eligibility lists with your ballots, use the links below.
- Creating an Organization Election
- Creating a Campus-Wide Election
- Configuring Eligibility Lists within a Ballot
Tips for creating Eligibility Lists based on email addresses
For most campuses, a user's email address is a self-reported piece of data that is collected during the first login. Since this piece of data is self-reported, it can sometimes be inaccurate due to user error (misspelling, typos, etc...). Therefore, an eligibility list based on email addresses can be less accurate than one based on usernames.
We advise that usernames be used as the primary option for eligibility lists, however, if you don't have access to those lists or are using OpenID as your authentication method, the following tips will help make your email eligibility list as strong as possible:
- Validate the list, using spreadsheet software, before uploading into the system by running searches to ensure that there are not duplicate emails or non .edu domains.
- Run an All Users report from your site and glance at the campus email column. If there are obvious inaccuracies correct them by navigating to the user's profile area in the "Users" administration section and making the appropriate changes. Some inaccuracies may include:
- Misspelling of institution name
- Using .com or .org instead of .edu in the email domain
- Misspelling of .edu in the email domain
- Using an email alias provided by the school that does not match the convention on your eligibility list (@students.school.edu instead of @school.edu)
If you have questions about setting up an email-based eligibility list, please contact our support team at support@campuslabs.com