Elections voting FAQs and troubleshooting

All College elections are administered by Civica Election Services (CES).

Civica are responsible for sending emails with voting links to eligible members and managing the voting site.

When you receive your voting email, there'll be a link to take you to the voting site.

Once you're there, you'll see a list of the election contests you're eligible to vote in.

After clicking on one of the contests, you'll see the list of candidates. Here, you can see their photos and statements.

When you're ready to cast your vote, you need to arrange the candidates in order of preference. You don't need to rank all the candidates, you can pick as many or as few as you want.

Once you've ranked all the candidates you want to vote for, click the submit button and you'll be given a chance to review your selections before casting your vote.

You can't change your vote after you've submitted it, so please check carefully before submitting.

No, you don't have to vote in all the contests you're eligible for. You can pick and choose which elections you'd like to vote in. 

You also don't have to do all your voting on the same day.

Yes, if you need to change your membership details after voting has opened and this makes you eligible to vote in one or more contests then you can be added to an electorate. This includes:

• Joining as a Member, Specialist Associate, or PMPT in a Division/Devolved Nation holding a PRDC election
• Reinstating your membership, if your previous membership grade made you eligible to vote
• Joining a Faculty or Special Interest Group
• Changing your address which means you'll join a different Division/Devolved Nation/International Division
• Changing your employment details to reflect that you're now a resident doctor

We'll be sending new data to Civica Election Services every Monday, so as long as your details have been amended by the end of Friday 10 April you'll be added to the relevant electorate(s) and sent instructions for voting.

Candidates should not be pressuring anyone to vote for them. If you feel a candidate is pressuring you to vote for them, or to join the electorate just so that you can vote for them, please contact elections@rcpsych.ac.uk as soon as possible so that we can look into it.

There can be a few reasons why your voting link hasn't arrived. Start by checking the following:

• Are you definitely eligible to vote? Please consult the voting eligibility table at the top of this page.
• Is the voting email in your spam/junk/filtered folder?
• Do we have the correct email address for you? Log in to the members area to check what your registered email address is - this is where your voting link has been sent. If the email address is incorrect, please update it before 10 April and we'll make sure your details get updated with Civica and your link to vote will be resent to the new address.

If the above steps don't work, please try talking to our voting AI which will ask you questions to find out what's causing the issue.

If the AI chatbot can't help you, you'll be directed to log the issue so that our elections team can investigate and fix the problem.

If a contest is missing on your elections site this probably means that there's an error on your membership record which meant you weren't included in the electorate for that contest. The most common problems are:

• You're not part of a Faculty or Special Interest Group, or you joined very recently after we sent the most recent voting data to Civica Election Services.
• Your address is out of date on the College database so you're not included in a Division/Devolved Nation/International Division.
• Your employment post is out of date so you're not recorded as a resident doctor.

Please check your details on the Members Area of the website using the following links:

• Check your email address and home address
• Check your faculty membership
• Check your special interest group membership
• Check your employment details

If anything is incorrect, please make changes. You'll then be added to the electorate when we send the next batch of data to Civica as long as the changes are made by the end of Friday 10 April.

If you've changed your home address, please let us know via our ticketing system as we'll need to change your division manually.

If the Faculty and SIG links don't work, try using an incognito browser. We have a technical issue with that part of the website at the moment that we're working on.

You can also talk to our Voting AI chatbot to try to establish the issue. If it's unable to help you, you'll be able to log the issue with our Elections team who'll rectify the situation.

If you're experiencing technical issues with the voting site, you'll need to contact Civica Election Services for their assistance. 

You can reply to your voting email to say that you're having trouble, or contact them directly on TakePart@civica.com.