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.
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.
The e-ballot system brings the judge’s ballot onto their own phone. No app to install, each judge receives a personal authentication link by email before the event. The chief judge sees every submission arrive in real time and can adjourn a contest once the last ballot arrives. No extra step to tally manually, it is all ready. Every ballot carries a timestamp and a verified judge identity — the digital equivalent of a signature.
I tested it across seven events, from a club-meeting tryout in January to a full digital deployment at my Area contest in March, plus a parallel validation run at a neighboring Area. The numbers back it up: digital results were ready in 1–3 minutes after the last speaker exited the stage. Manual tallying took in comparison 5 to 16 minutes, in the counting room alone, and got worse as the counting team fatigued through the day. Accuracy on the digital side doesn’t degrade — it doesn’t get tired.
I documented all of this up, including the failures along the way and what’s still unresolved, in a full report: E-Ballot System for Toastmasters Speech Contests (PDF) .
I shared about this project with Brendan O’Sullivan on the Toastmasters World Tour podcast (Ep. 26). That conversation goes past the report — how I ended up in Toastmasters in the first place, the bureaucracy to get World Headquarters' approval for even a pilot program, and the next thing I want to work on: transparent, public judging, the way it works at the Olympics, instead of anonymous ballots nobody ever gets to see or question.
My term as Area Director just ended, so I’m no longer the one who gets to decide to run this in my own contests. That’s actually the point of the next step: an administrator interface so any organizer can configure and run a contest independently, without me involved at all, and a wider pilot at Division or District level to prove it holds up. Alongside this, I’m preparing to work with World Headquarters on what a certified electronic ballot system should look like. The more alternative to pick from the richer the ecosystem.
None of this gets validated by me running it alone. If you organize Toastmasters contests — club, Area, Division, doesn’t matter — and you’re willing to run the digital ballot alongside your paper system as a backup, I want to hear from you. The simplest way to reach me is by email — my contact details are on the about page.
Software archeologist – Recovering Physicist – Dancer
As a scientist I studied the physics of the very small quantum world. As a computer hacker I distill code. Software is eating the world, and less code means less errors, less problems. Millions of lines of legacy code demand attention and have to be understood and simplified for future reliable operation.
