If you have a Gold or Platinum subscription plan, you can tell BallotBox to display a particular page of a ballot only if the voter answered a particular question on a previous ballot page in a particular way.
For example, you may only want to ask voters about a particular issue if they have a particular set of experiences. Here is one example: You could ask a group of real estate brokers and agents whether their work is at least 35% commercial, measured in commissions received. If a voter says yes to that question, she will see the ballot page that asks the set of questions related to commercial brokerage. If a voter says no, she will not see that page.
Enabling this feature
To enable these features, go to the Questions tab of your poll, and click on Ballot Options (the gear icon).
Select “Advanced” under the Features dropdown, and click Accept. (Note: Only Gold and Platinum subscription plans have access to Advanced Ballot Features.)
Conditioning a ballot page on a previous answer
The easiest way to see how this works is an example. (This example will be drawn from our Judicial Evaluation template.)
Imagine you want to ask questions about various federal judges, but there is one set of questions that you only want to ask a voter if he has appeared before Judge Aaron Andrews in the past 12 months.
So on the first page of your ballot, you create a multiple choice question called Federal Courts, and Judge Aaron Andrews is one of the options:
Next, you set up your ballot page within the same poll that has the questions you want to ask about Judge Andrews:
Just under the Page Title for this new ballot page, you can select when to Show Page. "Always" is the default, but here, we want to select the Question "Federal Courts," and the answer "Judge Aaron Andrews."
By doing that, the only voters who will see this page of the ballot will be those who select Judge Aaron Andrews as one of their choices when they answer the Federal Courts question.
Repeating ballot pages - one page for each answer
Now imagine that we have a set of questions that we'd like to ask once for each choice selected on a previous page. In our example, we might want to ask a set of questions about every federal judge that our voter has appeared before in the past 12 months.
Rather than create one ballot page for each judge, and condition its display on that judge's name being selected, we can use repeating ballot pages.
We will still select Based on answers to a previous question, and we will still select Federal Courts as the question, but now we will select Repeat for each selected choice.
If a voter were to select both Judge Andrews and Judge Bowen in response to the Federal Courts question, this one ballot page will appear twice, and the token {{choice}} will be replaced on the first of those pages with "Judge Aaron Andrews," and on the second of those pages with "Judge Bruce Bowen."
This is an extremely powerful ballot design feature. It allows you to configure a long and complex ballot very quickly, and in a way that will not appear long or complex to your voters. Your voters will only see the ballot pages that are relevant to them.
Tip: This feature is available to our turn-key support customers who have Gold or Platinum Subscriptions, so you do not have to become an expert in conditioned ballot pages. BallotBox personnel are more than happy to administer all aspects of your poll for you, including the management of conditioned and repeating ballot pages.