E-ballot for Toastmasters speech contests
I spent the last few months building and field-testing a digital ballot system for Toastmasters speech contests, and I’m ready to talk about it in public. The problem Paper judging doesn’t scale. A judge fills out a ranking, a ballot counter collects it — breaking the judge’s anonymity in the process — and the counting team retreats to a private room to tally by hand. At small events this is a minor inconvenience. At the joint Area contest I organized this year, expecting a maximum of 66 contestants spread across twelve back-to-back contests hosted in a single 10-hour venue window, manual tallying becomes the bottleneck of the event.
