USC-JPIA Student Election: 1,117-Voter Case Study
How USC-JPIA's 1,117-voter student election scored 9.08/10 voter satisfaction and NPS +65 on TapVoter — full case study with 108 voter survey responses.
The USC-JPIA Commission on Elections ran their 2026 student government election entirely on TapVoter — 1,757 eligible voters, 1,117 ballots cast, and a post-election survey that came back with an NPS of +65.
The setup
The USC-JPIA Commission on Elections is the election body for the Junior Philippine Institute of Accountants chapter at the University of San Carlos. Like most student COMELECs, they have a hard window to pull off a clean election: candidate filing, campaign period, silent day, vote day, and canvassing — all run by student volunteers, on top of their coursework.
For their 2026 election, the COMELEC chose TapVoter to run the entire vote online: voter key authentication, the ballot itself, and the official tally.
“TapVoter made elections even more convenient and accessible, most especially to voters. It saved us both time and effort, improved coordination, and helped information dissemination efficiently with a few clicks.”
“If TapVoter didn’t exist, we would have resorted to the most familiar platform — Google Forms. However, it isn’t specifically made for elections, and we would have needed to design manual controls to ensure compliance with integrity and transparency measures. TapVoter did just that. More so, TapVoter went beyond our expectations for a budget-friendly platform. We didn’t expect the amount of built-in features it has to offer, which truly made our job as election officers much, much easier.”
What the voters said
After the election, the COMELEC ran an optional post-election survey asking voters to rate the experience. 108 voters responded — roughly 1 in 10 of the people who actually cast a ballot. The numbers were unusually clean:
Process scores (% of voters who gave the top rating)
The mobile share is worth pausing on. Three out of four voters cast their ballot on a phone (75%) and another 12% on a tablet — which means the desktop / laptop experience accounted for less than 1 in 8 ballots. For student elections, mobile-first isn’t a nice-to-have.
The unprompted love
The survey ended with two open-text questions: one thing you liked, and one thing to improve. 48 voters wrote substantive answers to the first question — unprompted, voluntary, and answered in their own words.
Selected verbatim from 48 substantive responses. The five words that repeated most often across the full set: easy, fast, smooth, convenient, and organized.
The honest part: what voters wanted improved
21 voters wrote substantive answers to one thing to improve. We read every single one. Here’s the pattern that jumped out:
Not a single substantive improvement suggestion was about the voting platform itself. Every complaint was about the election — wanting more candidates, longer campaign periods, more visible platform statements, better candidate introductions.
That is genuinely unusual in a post-election voter survey. Normally you get a mix — some platform gripes, some logistics gripes, some structural ones. Here, the structural feedback drowned out everything else:
“There should be an opposing party.”
About the slate, not the platform
“More information about the candidates.”
About campaign communications
“Emphasize the campaign period — it was too short and I didn’t even know it had started.”
About the campaign timeline
“Longer campaign periods and more parties / candidates.”
About the election structure
“Put their platforms also.”
About candidate information
From our angle, this is the highest possible compliment a voting platform can get. When the platform disappears into the background and voters are free to think about the actual election — who’s running, what they stand for, whether the field is competitive — that’s the job done.
Three takeaways for other school COMELECs
- Mobile-first is non-optional for student elections. 87% of USC-JPIA voters used a phone or tablet. If your ballot doesn’t feel native on a phone, you’ll lose voters at the door.
- Google Forms costs you the integrity story. Clark named it directly: Forms would have required them to bolt on manual controls for voter authentication, dedup, and audit — the exact controls a COMELEC needs to defend its results during canvassing.
- If you run a post-election voter survey, run it on the platform too. USC-JPIA used TapVoter’s post-vote survey to capture 108 voter responses with no extra tooling. The resulting data turned a routine election into a defensible success story.
Related reading
Run your school election on TapVoter
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