Acclaimed Contests

An acclaimed contest is decided before voting: its configured candidates are elected without a vote. The contest remains visible throughout the voter and results experience, but it never becomes part of an encoded ballot.

The feature follows one rule:

An acclaimed contest is displayed but never encoded.

This is a per-contest setting. An election may contain both acclaimed and normally voted contests.

Configuration

1. Open the target Contest in the Admin Portal.
2. Go to the Data tab and expand Ballot Design.
3. Enable Decided by acclamation.
4. Confirm that the configured candidates are the people who should be elected.
5. Save the Contest and generate a new ballot publication.

Configure acclamation before publishing ballots. The setting determines which contests participate in ballot encoding, so changing it after publication can invalidate existing Ballot IDs and make ballots incompatible with their published definition.

See Contest Data for the other contest settings.

Acclamation notice

By default, the Voting Portal and Ballot Verifier use the standard translated acclamation notice. A contest can override it per language in its presentation configuration:

{
  "i18n": {
    "en": {
      "acclamation_description": "This contest was decided by acclamation."
    },
    "fr": {
      "acclamation_description": "Ce vote a été acquis par acclamation."
    }
  }
}

The current language is used when available, followed by the configured default language and then the application's standard translated notice.

Voting Portal behavior

The ballot and review screens show the acclaimed contest in the normal contest order, including its notice and available candidates. Candidate options are disabled and cannot be selected.

The following settings do not apply to an acclaimed contest:

• minimum and maximum selection requirements;
• under-vote, over-vote, blank-vote, and invalid-vote policies;
• explicit blank and invalid options; and
• write-in entry.

Mixed election

When an election contains both acclaimed and normally voted contests, the voter completes only the normally voted contests. Those selections produce the usual encrypted ballot, Ballot ID, audit option, receipt, and tracking flow. The acclaimed contest contributes nothing to that ballot.

Fully acclaimed election

When every contest on the voter's ballot is acclaimed, there is nothing to cast. The voter can review what was decided, but:

• no ballot is encrypted or submitted;
• no Ballot ID, QR code, tracking link, receipt, or audit option is created; and
• the confirmation screen explicitly states that no ballot was cast.

Ballot Verifier behavior

An acclaimed contest has no decoded selection because it is not encoded. For a mixed election, the Ballot Verifier combines the decoded selections with the acclaimed contests from the embedded ballot configuration for display. It then shows the same acclamation notice and disabled candidates as the Voting Portal review screen.

This merge is presentation-only. It does not add the contest to decoded ballot data and does not change ballot hashing, signature checks, re-encoding checks, or Ballot ID comparison. A fully acclaimed election has no auditable ballot to open in the verifier.

See Audit your Vote for the complete voter audit procedure and Ballot Encoding Specification for the encoding rules.

Tally and results

Because no ballots contain the acclaimed contest, the tally creates its result from the published contest configuration rather than running the configured counting algorithm. The result contains:

• zero census, participation, votes, blank votes, invalid votes, candidate totals, and percentages;
• every eligible configured candidate marked as a winner, in configured order, with winning positions 1..N; and
• no counting process or participation-by-channel data.

Explicit blank and invalid markers, disabled candidates, and empty write-in slots are not treated as elected candidates. The Admin Portal, public Results Portal and PDF report show an acclamation notice instead of normal participation figures.

Tally sheets are rejected for acclaimed contests because paper, postal, and other external votes cannot be added to a contest that was decided without a vote.

See Generating Results for the canonical tally result shape.

Summary

Aspect	Behavior
Configuration	Contest Data → Ballot Design → Decided by acclamation
When to configure	Before ballot publication; do not change it after publishing
Voter interaction	Contest and candidates shown, but every option is disabled
Ballot encoding	No plaintext position, ciphertext, or decoded contest
Mixed election	Other contests are cast and audited normally
Fully acclaimed election	No ballot, Ballot ID, receipt, tracker, or audit
Verifier	Adds the contest from ballot configuration for display only
Tally	Synthetic zero result; every eligible candidate is a winner
Participation	Suppressed and replaced by an acclamation notice
Tally sheets	Rejected