Spectator voting: QR ballots, open and closed shows

Every car in your show gets a windshield card, and every card carries that car’s own QR code. A spectator points a phone at any card, the ballot opens, they type the number of the car they liked, and the vote lands. No app, no account, no line at a ballot box.

What a voter actually does

The card is the entry point, which is worth understanding because it changes how you lay out the field. A voter does not need to find a specific car’s card to vote for that car; scanning any card opens the ballot, and then they enter the number. Cards are the invitation, not the ballot itself.

That means a card blown off a dash does not disenfranchise anyone, and a spectator who scanned at the front of the field can vote for something they saw at the back.

Open voting and closed voting

Shows disagree about who should get a say, and both traditions are old and defensible.

Setting	Who votes	Typical show
Open	Anyone at the show	Public charity shows, cruise-ins, anything selling spectator admission
Closed	Participants only	Club shows where entrants judge each other, invitationals

Whichever you pick, your show page says so in plain words. Ambiguity about who may vote is where arguments start, and the fix is telling people up front rather than at the trophy table.

The mixed case most shows actually want

A closed show does not have to shut the crowd out entirely. At a closed show, spectators can still vote People’s Choice while your participant-only classes stay participant-only.

This is the arrangement a lot of clubs already run informally, where members pick the class winners and the public picks a crowd favorite. It used to take a workaround. Now it is what the setting does.

Duplicate protection, honestly described

Ballots are limited to one vote per person per category, with duplicate protection layered on top of that. Depending on how you have set up the show, the ballot may ask for an identifying field, which is what gives the limit something to work with.

Be clear-eyed about what this is. No crowd voting system on earth is tamper proof, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What this does is remove the easy repeat voting that makes an unattended ballot box meaningless, which is the actual failure mode at car shows.

Every pick saves itself

On the ballot, each pick is saved the moment it is made and the page says so under the category. A spectator who wanders off mid-ballot, or whose phone locks in their pocket, has lost nothing; coming back shows the picks already made.

Changing a vote

New shows let a voter change a pick, and the change replaces the earlier vote rather than being rejected, so “wait, I meant the red one” is not a trip to the registration table. The confirmation also shows the registrant’s name under the car, “Car #42, 1987 Buick GNX, Ray K.”, so the voter knows they typed the right number. Both are settings under Settings, Voting, for a show that wants otherwise.

Keeping voting on the grounds

A ballot link can be texted out of town. The location check decides what happens when someone opens it from there: nothing, a polite ask, or a hard line with any staff member as the way in. It is a fence, not a wall, and it never refuses anyone by their network address. The three settings and the staff pass are in the location check.

Why voting is on site only

Voting works at the show. There is no remote ballot, and that is a design decision rather than a gap in the feature.

A ballot reachable from anywhere stops measuring the show and starts measuring whose family group chat is largest. Every organizer who has run an online poll has watched a mediocre car win because its owner has four hundred cousins. Keeping the ballot at the show keeps People’s Choice meaning the people who chose to be there.

Spectators without a phone

Some part of your crowd is not carrying a smartphone, and at plenty of shows that part skews toward exactly the people whose opinion the field most wants.

Put a voting station on the registration table: a tablet, open to the ballot, that anyone can use. It costs you a spare device and a minute of setup, and it means nobody is turned away from voting because of the hardware in their pocket.

Cars that never checked in

By default every registered car stays on the ballot whether or not it arrived. Turn that setting off and a car that never checked in drops out of the standings, which some shows prefer so a trophy never goes to an empty parking spot.

Leaving it on is the safer default, because the usual reason a car has no check-in is a volunteer who handed over the card without the click. The dashboard and the Results page say when a car is getting votes without a check-in, and once voting is open the dashboard offers to check in every registered car still waiting, so the setting never has to guess for you.

What the top list means

Shows disagree about what a Top 25 is. For some it means the twenty-five cars with the most votes overall. For others it means the runners-up behind Best of Show.

Both are available as a setting, along with a third: rank the top list by the votes in one category alone. Your results page states which convention your show used. Picking one in advance is how you avoid explaining the distinction to somebody holding a plaque.

Keeping the standings dark

The live leaderboard is on by default: a phone page and a TV board that update as votes come in, plus a Live results tab in the site menu. Some shows would rather nobody watched the count. The usual reason is a hand-picked award that overrides a category: if the board showed one car leading all afternoon and the trophy goes to another, the organizer spends the ceremony explaining. Settings, Awards and tally, then turn off Live results. That removes the leaderboard, the tab, and both TV boards in one move (and the sponsor strip along the bottom of them); the tally stays private on the Results page until you announce it, and voting itself does not change.

The moment voting closes

Voting opens and closes on the clock if you want it to: set Voting opens and Voting ends with the show’s dates under Settings, Show details, and the show moves itself, with a countdown on the ballot the whole way. The dashboard’s buttons still work for moving early.

Votes tally as they arrive rather than in a batch at the end, so closing voting does not start a count. It ends one.

The hour that used to go to sorting paper slips on a folding table simply is not there any more. Winners are ready as soon as you close the ballot, which means the awards ceremony can start while the crowd is still on the field instead of after half of it has driven home. If you have never run a show this way, budget the hour anyway the first time, then enjoy having it back.

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