Votes

All authenticated users can view polls and cast votes on polls they are eligible for. Creating and managing polls requires a maintainer, board-member, or executive-director persona.

The Votes section lets you create and manage polls for formal project governance decisions. Votes are used for committee elections, policy approvals, and other decisions that require a recorded community response.

What you can do

• View all polls for your project or foundation
• Create new polls with custom options and voting rules
• Cast your vote on open polls
• View real-time and final vote results
• Manage poll settings and close polls

Navigation

To view and cast votes, select My Votes from the left navigation sidebar in the Me lens (route: /votes) — this lists the polls you're eligible for across your projects and foundations.

To manage polls for a specific context, switch to your Project or Foundation lens using the lens switcher, then select Votes from the left navigation sidebar. The votes dashboard (route: /project/votes or /foundation/votes) lists all polls for your active project or foundation context. Use the tabs to filter: All, Active, Draft, Ended.

In the Project and Foundation lenses, selecting the current status tab again keeps your current page, unless a closing-soon shortcut is selected. Selecting a different status returns to the first page and loads matching polls.

Project and Foundation summaries

Two summary cells appear above the status tabs:

• Votes Closing in the Next 7 Days counts active votes with a deadline strictly after now and within the next seven 24-hour periods. Draft and ended votes do not count.
• Active Votes counts all indexed-active votes you can access in the selected context, not only those you were invited to. An overdue or invalid deadline does not remove an otherwise active vote from this total.

Active status is matched without regard to letter case in both summaries and their matching lists, including legacy votes with inconsistent status casing. These votes retain the same actions as other active votes.

Both counts respect Group, cover every matching vote rather than only the visible page, and ignore search, status tabs, and pagination. A Foundation summary uses that foundation's selected context; it does not combine descendant projects.

Select Votes Closing in the Next 7 Days to switch to Active and show only closing-soon votes. Select it again to clear only the shortcut and keep Active selected. Select Active Votes to clear closing-only mode and show active votes from page one, even if Active was already selected. Search, Group, and rows per page are preserved. Selecting any status tab clears closing-only mode; Reset filters clears it and the table filters. Empty filtered lists retain the controls and Reset action.

While the summary loads, counts show dashes and the cells are disabled. A successful empty scope shows zero. A failed summary shows unavailable counts and Unable to load vote summary with Retry; the list remains usable, and Retry reloads only the summary.

While a replacement list or its total is loading, pagination is hidden so the previous mode's count is not presented as current. Search, Group, and status controls remain available. Pagination returns once the matching rows and total are available.

Changing context or Group, refreshing the list, or returning after creating/editing a vote reloads the totals. Closing selection also refreshes the summary. Totals and list pages use separate time snapshots and may differ near a deadline; they do not update continuously while idle. Changes may take time to appear in the search index. My Votes and existing creation, voting, and result permissions are unchanged.

Sharing a link to a vote

Select ⋮ → Copy link on an active or ended vote to copy a direct link to it, which you can paste into an email, a chat or a mailing list. Draft votes have no link.

Opening the link signs you in if needed and opens the vote in My Votes: you can cast your vote if you're invited and haven't voted yet, and otherwise you see the vote. Project and group managers see the same view they get from the Votes dashboard. People who don't have access to the vote see Page not found.

My Votes summary

Two summary cells above the table help you find approaching deadlines and outstanding responses:

• Votes Closing in the Next 7 Days counts active votes with a deadline after the current time and within seven days, including votes you have already responded to. Next shows the nearest matching deadline.
• Need Your Vote counts active votes explicitly awaiting your response, regardless of their deadline. Earliest deadline shows the earliest valid deadline among those votes. An overdue vote still marked active can appear here.

Counts describe the returned personal feed within your selected foundation, project, and group, not just the visible page. Search, status tabs, and summary selection do not change these totals. Dates use your local timezone; the time snapshot refreshes when votes load successfully or you select a summary cell, not continuously while the page is idle.

Select a cell to filter the table and switch to Active. Select the same cell again to clear only the summary filter, leaving Active selected; select the other cell to switch filters. Search, group, foundation, project, and rows per page are preserved, and the table returns to its first page. Selecting any status tab, including Active again, clears the summary filter.

If your filters have no matches, No results found keeps the controls available. Reset filters clears the summary and table filters. If a scope change removes the selected group, only that group selection is cleared.

My Votes group choices use consistent English alphabetical ordering across browser and server locales.

While loading, the cells show dashes and cannot be selected. A successfully loaded empty feed shows zero. If loading fails, counts are unavailable and Unable to load your votes appears instead of the no-invitations message. Select Retry to reload without losing your search and group controls.

Key concepts

• Poll: A formal vote with defined options and an eligible voter set
• Voter eligibility: Voter eligibility is configured by the poll creator.
• Vote result: The tally of responses after the poll closes

Project context

Votes are scoped to a specific project or foundation. Use the lens switcher to change your active context and see votes for a different project.

Related sections

• Committees — committee members are often the eligible voter set for polls
• Surveys — for collecting general feedback rather than formal decisions