I've been going forms-crazy

The day after our last class, Yearbook launched its teacher survey and its senior polls. We set up forms that had required names and student ID numbers, and weeded out invalid votes before counting anything. We kept the polls open till the Tuesday after Presidents' Weekend, about one week. We opened the Media Lab that Tuesday lunch and snared some procrastinating seniors.

We had about the same number of voters return ballots as we had with paper ballots (about 160 for each--more than half the senior class for their polls but about 15 pct of the entire school for the teacher polls). The big difference was in the counting. We downloaded them onto Excel spreadsheets and sorted away! In many categories, you didn't even have to count. You just could see that "Suzy Sunshine" had a way bigger swath of votes than anyone else in "Best Smile." Counting the votes took less than one hour. Each counting computer had a rapt audience which meant there was no cheating. The cleanest elections ever.

I went and used forms for my classes, too...will share more on my website. Suffice it to say, "Never forget to ask the respondents their names."