Audience Voting Systems
The tallying up of votes and preserving voter anonymity can be a
challenging affair in many situations; this is where audience
voting systems can be of tremendous help. Traditionally used
in conferences or lecture halls, audience voting systems have
become more and more common, having now found another application
in helping participants of webcasts to interact with the
presenter.
Automated voting systems have a number of major advantages over,
say, a show of hands in an audience. Possibly the biggest
advantage an audience voting system is that those participating in
the vote can remain anonymous, the results are received by a
receiver device and sent to the a central computer. The
presenter can view the total number of votes of which can be
anonymous or identified.
Another advantage is that it makes totalling the votes and
processing the result a lot easier than it would have been if votes
were made by show of hands, or if votes were submitted on written
cards. An audience voting system is therefore especially
useful if a number of topics need to be voted on in a single
session; a task that would be difficult otherwise.
These electronic voting systems are a practical implementation
of audience
response systems - the wider group of technologies facilitating
audience interaction. It is important to distinguish audience
voting systems from electronic
voting systems: an audience voting system is mostly used for
live interaction with other audience members or the presenter,
whereas an electronic voting system refers to any electronic means
of actually taking votes.