Lesson 1: E-Ballot Tutorial

You will rank and evaluate the competitors in your round using an electronic ballot. This is a sample eBallot for the speech event, ‘Open Informative.’ The ballot may look a little different based on the event that you are judging, but the core elements are all the same. 

Sample Open Informative (speech) Ballot

When you first open your ballot, there will be a ballot tutorial that guides you through the elements on the page. We will go through this tutorial together.

At the top, you will see your name and the event you are judging.

Click the blue ‘Live Video Room’ button to open the video conferencing room where you will meet the competitors for your round. 

If you need help before or during the round, click ‘Need Help’. This will notify the Help Room, and a tournament staff member will join your video room shortly. 

When you open ‘Event Rules’, there will be a video tutorial giving an overview of the event as well as the written rules. Feel free to look over the video and the rules before you begin the round. 

A tutorial video like the one on the right will be embedded into your ballot

When you click ‘Feedback’, a form will open with the timer and a textbox. You can write your comments for each competitor here. This is a required field, so you cannot submit your ballot without any feedback.

Next to ‘Feedback’, you will see the ‘prompts’ button. Some events such as Impromptu and SPAR require you to provide prompts to the competitors. Click this button, and a list of prompts will open. This topic will also be covered in-depth in a later lesson. 

In the same row, you will see the No-Show button. As mentioned in an earlier lesson, if the competitor has not checked in within ten minutes of the round, click ‘No-Show’ to notify the tournament staff and the competitor’s coach. 

When you have a ‘Speech Topic’ Box, you can type in the topic of the competitor’s speech. For example, if Billie Jean King is giving an informative speech on Tennis, you can type in ‘Tennis’. 

After all the competitors perform, you can select the ranks for each competitor. Select 1st for competitor that you thought performed the best; select 2nd for the next best, and so on. You cannot tie any ranks except for last place.

You can repeat this ballot tutorial as many times as necessary by clicking the ‘ballot tutorial’ button at the top of the ballot.

Try going through different sample ballots yourself by clicking on the image below. The page will open in a new tab.