True Anonymity ships with four vote-mode templates (Quick Poll / Formal Election / Sensitive Survey / Deliberation Vote) that pre-fill defaults appropriate to the stakes — voter count, recommended turnout floor, default visibility, ceremony level. Pick the closest match below; the form is already half-filled when you start.
Council elections suffer from two common failures: low turnout that produces a weak mandate, and "the popular kid won" feedback that makes the result feel illegitimate. True Anonymity addresses both.
Google Forms can collect votes, but it can't tell the new council "your win came from 28% of the eligible student body" or "this margin is fragile". True Anonymity's report does. That changes how the council acts in office.
Lunch length, uniform policy, device rules, schedule changes. The hard part isn't collecting votes — it's making sure voters actually understood the tradeoffs before voting yes or no, and then defending the result against "nobody knew what they were voting for".
The decision-legitimacy report can say "the result is suitable for action" or "re-explain before acting" or "revise the ballot options". The school doesn't just have a number; it has a defensible institutional next step.
Parents want transparency without exposing their child. Schools want honest feedback without parent backlash. Both are usually undermined by a Google Form that arrives with no privacy explanation and no obvious way to verify what the school can and can't see.
The parent association vote on dress code changes from "the school sends a form, parents wonder if their child's response is private" to "parents read a one-paragraph addendum, vote anonymously, and see the result alongside the abstention breakdown".
Safety, belonging, anti-bullying, teacher feedback, school climate. The decisions where a candid answer could plausibly cost the voter something. Voters won't answer honestly unless they trust both the math (technical anonymity) and the institution (acceptable-use policy).
The five-category abstention framework is most useful here. A school running a teacher-feedback survey gets: information barrier tells them the survey wasn't well-framed; trust barrier tells them voters don't trust the process; pressure barrier tells them the climate around the vote was coercive. Three different fixes for what would otherwise look like the same low-turnout result.
Important: don't launch sensitive surveys as your first True Anonymity deployment. Build credibility with a low-stakes pilot first (Use Case 1 or 2). Voters need to see that the system delivered honest results once before they trust it with sensitive answers.
The community needs to rank a fixed list of projects (e.g., "of these 6 capital projects, which 3 should we fund this year?"). The hard part is making sure voters understood the tradeoffs — knowing project A means project B doesn't get funded — before they ranked.
"The community ranked Project A first" is one statement. "The community ranked Project A first, with strong turnout, moderate comprehension, and a 12% trust-barrier abstention rate" is a different statement, and only the second one tells the board whether to act on the ranking.
Build credibility before running sensitive votes. The governance docs include a full deployment guide with this sequence.