Voting-only shows: number the cars yourself, run the ballot here

Plenty of clubs already have registration handled. Entries come in on a paper form at the gate, or through a system the club has used for a decade and isn’t about to leave, and the only thing missing is a People’s Choice ballot that doesn’t involve a coffee can and a stack of index cards. Voting-only is that ballot. You number the cars, the platform counts the votes, and nobody has to invent a registrant to make it work.

The setting exists because a memorial show in Virginia ran 1,250 cars through spectator voting this September and had to fake it: they imported 1,250 placeholder entries called “Vehicle 1” through “Vehicle 1250”, then spent an afternoon deleting the ones they didn’t need, one click at a time. It worked. Two hundred forty-three people voted and the winner took it by a mile. But that’s a day of somebody’s life the product should have spent instead, so now it does.

Turning it on

Manage, Settings, Registration. The first box on the tab is called How cars get on the ballot, and the setting is Voting only: I number the cars myself. Turn it on and save.

Everything below it on that tab stops applying: the entry fee, the closing date, the form fields, the waiver. The register page on your public site now says cars are registered at the show, the kiosk says they’re numbered there, and nothing accepts an entry. Turn it off later and all of that comes back exactly as you left it.

Numbering the cars

Go to Registrants. On a voting-only show the top of that page is a card called Numbered cars. Type the highest number you expect to hand out, pick the category the cars belong in, and press Create the numbers.

That’s the whole job. The cars exist from 1 to whatever you typed, each one in the category you picked, with no owner and no vehicle details, because the ballot doesn’t need any. Run it again with a bigger number later and it only adds the missing ones. The ceiling is 5,000 cars per show, which is more than any field we’ve seen and a lot more than any parking lot.

Guessed high? The same card has Remove cars above, which deletes every numbered car past the number you give it. A car that already has a vote stays put, and the card tells you how many it kept. (We’d rather leave you an extra car than lose a vote over an arithmetic slip.)

One category is the normal setup, People’s Choice or Best in Show, and you add it under Categories and awards before you make the numbers. If you run several, the numbers go in whichever category you pick at creation time, and you can make the next batch in a different one. Every car needs a category or the ballot has nothing to vote in, and the card says so if you’ve skipped that step.

Handing out the numbers

Print the generic windshield cards the way any show does (see check-in and windshield cards). They carry your show name, a big blank box, the category checkboxes, and the QR code to the ballot. As a car parks, write the next number in the box and put the card on the dash. There’s no check-in step and no list to find the car on, because there was never a registration to check in against.

Numbers don’t have to be consecutive on the field. Write 1 through 400 on Saturday morning and skip a few, and the ballot doesn’t care; a voter typing 212 gets Car 212 whether or not 211 showed up.

What voters see

The ballot on a voting-only show asks for a Car Number and nothing else. The drop-down list of cars that other shows can turn on is never offered here, because a list of 1,250 identical entries would be a cruel thing to scroll on a phone in the sun. The voter types the number off the windshield, the page confirms Car 846, and the vote is cast.

All of your other voting settings work as usual. Votes per category, whether a voter can change their mind, the identity fields you ask for, and the location check that keeps voting on the grounds are all set on the Voting tab and apply the same way. The one thing a voting-only show quietly skips is the checked-in rule, since no car is ever checked in.

Results

Results, the live results page and the TV board list winners by number: Car 846, then Car 909. There’s no owner name to show, so announce the number and let the crowd turn around. Finalize the results the same way any show does, and the winners block on your public page reads the same way afterward.

Mixing numbered cars with real entries

You can turn voting-only on for a show that already has registrations, and the numbered cars sit alongside them. The registrants keep their names and details; the numbered cars are just numbers. Registrants never see the numbered cars in the list, the export, or the card desk, because those tools are about people, and a numbered car has none behind it. Honestly, most clubs want one or the other, but the mix is there for the show that took thirty entries online and then had ninety more turn up on the day.

What it does not do

• It doesn’t collect a fee. There’s nobody to charge. Take gate money the way you always have.
• It doesn’t email anyone. No confirmation, no blast, because there are no registrants.
• It doesn’t let you attach a name or a vehicle to a number after the fact. If you want owners on the results, you want registration, and the importer takes a spreadsheet.
• It doesn’t stop you from making the numbers at the last minute. The evening before is fine. Ten minutes before gates is fine too, though we’d rather you didn’t test the limit.

Next: add the category, make the numbers, and open voting from the dashboard the morning of. Then send someone out with the cards and a marker.

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