Weighted (proxy) voting

Introduced in Community Polls 7.1.0.

Weighted voting lets a single member cast one ballot that is counted as more than one vote. It was built for association and assembly votes where members may carry proxies for absent members: each voter makes one choice, and that choice counts for themselves plus everyone who delegated their vote to them.

The model is deliberately simple — there are no separate proxy ballots and no "vote on behalf of" picker. A member votes once; the system multiplies that vote by a weight the administrator assigned beforehand.

voting weight = 1 (the member's own vote) + number of proxies

A member may carry 0 to N proxies (you choose the upper bound per poll — see Setting the proxy limit). The server's absolute ceiling is 100.

Turning it on

1. Open the poll in the editor wizard.
2. Step through Build → Design → Voting weights.
3. Enable Weighted (proxy) voting at the top of the step.
4. Save the poll. Draft is the right status while you're still assigning proxies — assignments lock the moment the poll goes Live.

Enabling weighted voting changes how the poll behaves:

• Login is required. A guest has no account to attach a proxy weight to, so guests cannot vote on a weighted poll.
• One ballot per member, always — regardless of the per-poll restriction method. The weighting model relies on each member voting exactly once.

Assigning proxies

Proxy assignments live directly inside the Voting weights wizard step — there's no separate page to visit.

• Use Add a member to search by name, username, or email and add a member with a chosen proxy count.
• Each row has a proxy selector. The Weight column shows the derived 1 + proxies.
• Remove a member to revert them to a plain weight of 1.

Setting the proxy limit per poll

A number field at the top of the assignments card — Maximum proxies per member — controls the upper bound of the proxy selector. Default is 5. Pick whatever your by-laws permit (1 to 100). The value is not saved with the poll: it's a UI knob that just shapes the dropdown so you aren't scrolling past a hundred entries when your rule allows three.

The field can never be lowered below the highest already-saved proxy on the poll, so you can't accidentally hide a member's existing assignment.

Importing from a CSV

Click Import CSV to bulk-load proxy assignments. The file has two columns — a header row is optional:

email,proxy_count
mario.rossi@email.it,5
anna.bianchi@email.it,2

Importing is a two-step process:

1. Preview — every row is matched against a Joomla user account. Matched and skipped rows are listed so you can review them before committing. Rows are skipped when the email is invalid, the proxy count is not a whole number, the count exceeds the server's hard ceiling, the email matches no member account, or the email is duplicated within the file.
2. Import — only the matched rows are written.

Once the poll goes Live

The same Voting weights step renders as a read-only mirror: the toggle disables, a "locked" notice appears, and the assignments table still shows every member and proxy count but hides the add-member box, the CSV import button, the proxy selectors, and the remove buttons. To change assignments again, move the poll back to Draft on the Publish step.

This is enforced by the server too — every weight-mutation request is refused while the poll is Live or Closed. The guarantee is that the tally can never be disputed because delegations are fixed before voting opens.

The audit report

The audit report lives on the poll's Results page, in the Voting weights section at the bottom — it only appears once a weighted poll is collecting (or has collected) ballots. For every member who holds a proxy assignment or has cast a vote it confirms:

Column	Meaning
Member	Display name / username
Email	Account email
Proxies	Proxies assigned
Weight	Effective voting weight (1 + proxies)
Voted	Whether the member has cast a ballot (Yes / No)

The report never shows which option a member chose — the ballot stays secret. Use Export audit CSV for an offline copy.

Weighted results

The Results page's Voting weights section also shows the tally for the poll:

• The weighted total per option is the primary figure.
• The raw ballot count is reported alongside it.
• Percentages are computed against the weighted total.

Results for a weighted poll are an administrator-only view. Individual ballots remain secret; the tally never reveals who chose what.

Post-vote confirmation for voters

For polls where results should not be visible to voters (the typical association-vote setup), turn off Show results after vote in the editor. Voters then see a short confirmation card instead of any tally after submitting. You can customise the confirmation message via the poll's End message field — if it's left blank, a generic "Thank you. Your vote has been recorded." is shown.

How the weight is recorded

Each ballot snapshots the weight it was cast at. If a member's proxy count is changed later (while the poll is still unpublished), ballots already recorded keep the weight they were counted with — a reassignment never silently rewrites a tally.

Permissions

• Reading the Voting weights panel (and the Results page section) requires core.manage on the component.
• Changing proxy assignments — adding members, editing counts, importing CSVs — requires core.edit.

The server clamps every assignment to its hard ceiling and refuses every mutation against a Live or Closed poll, regardless of the user's role.

Data model

Object	Purpose
#__communitypolls_vote_weights	One row per (poll, member) proxy assignment
#__communitypolls_votes.weight	The weight each ballot was cast at (default 1)
Poll attribute weighted_voting	Per-poll on/off flag

Non-weighted polls are unaffected: every ballot carries a weight of 1, so the weighted sum equals the raw count.