Background

The Church of God enlisted the help of IML’s audience response system to facilitate the voting for their biennial International General Assembly. The event brought approximately 3,500 Ordained Bishops to San Antonio to take action in electing new leadership and passing resolutions that would determine the direction for the future of the church.

Challenge

The challenge was to provide a fast and accurate audience voting system that was capable of dealing with several thousand voting members from a list of over 10,000; each voting member needed to verify their voting eligibility before each election and motion. This information would then need to be instantly reported and displayed to the entire assembly.

Solution

The 2008 International General Assembly utilized IML Election, a unique piece of software developed in-house, to record votes and elections at member meetings. All of the eligible voting members present at the meeting were assigned a Smartcard that was linked to a database within the IML Servers containing their name and unique Ministerial ID number. This card was used to instantly verify their credentials before each election and motion, and was necessary to take part in a vote. This ensured that the only votes received came from the eligible parties.

The General Assembly used IML Election not only for single seat position, but also multi-seat committees. The multi-seat elections required up to 18 nominations from each eligible member. This equated to nearly 90,000 votes being calculated instantly by IML. Even with this vast number of votes received, the IML Election software was able to report: how many votes each individual had received, how many invalid votes were cast, how many people received the required number of votes, and how many votes were required to be elected. This report was printed off, first for the Tellers Committee to scrutinize, and then the results were read to the assembly with the name of each nominated party appearing on screen as they were read out. This list ran into the thousands.

The advanced electronic voting software also permitted the assembly to vote on motions with the same transparent and definitive results as the seated elections. The IML service was agile enough to react to the live debate and facilitate spontaneous motions regarding any issues called from the floor. Motion results were produced instantly, again allowing for prompt and concise reporting to the body of the assembly.

IML Election introduced exceptional efficiency into the business portion of the General Assembly. IML provided a fast, reliable, and user-friendly method for gathering voting data and immediately generating succinct and transparent reporting.

Client testimonial:

“With IML’s involvement in the voting at the assembly, there came more than just consistency and reliability. IML provided quick, accurate results with less work or concern about the procedure or the technology, and ultimately provided a peace of mind throughout delegation."

Scot Carter, Church of God