Judging needs three things from a system: a class list you control, a sheet each judge can fill in on a phone while standing beside a car, and a tally that adds up without anyone retyping it. Public voting needs a fourth thing, which is a ballot that opens and closes when you say, counts once per person, and stays invisible until you release it.
Classes belong to the club, and they change
Every club's class list is a local agreement, argued over each winter. Classes split when a marque gets popular, merge when entries thin out, and carry caps of their own. A car sometimes arrives in the wrong one and has to be moved on the morning without cancelling and rebooking the entry.
A tool with a fixed set of categories makes you describe your show in somebody else's words, and the difference is reconciled by hand at the judging table.
What a judge sheet has to cope with
- No signal. A field is a field, so sheets are filled in and held locally until they can be sent.
- Partial scoring. Judges work through a class over hours, and a half-finished sheet must never be lost.
- Criteria that differ by class, so a restoration class is not scored like a modified one.
- Written comments, which entrants often value more than the score.
- A judge who should not score a car they own, or an officer's own vehicle.
- Ties, and whatever your rules say resolves them.
People's choice is a different problem
A public ballot is not a smaller version of judging. It is open to anyone on the field, it runs for a window you set, and its integrity is the whole point. You need a way to stop one person voting repeatedly, by whatever check you are comfortable with, and the tally has to stay hidden from everybody but the committee while voting is open.
Paper ballots in a box solve the trust problem and create a counting problem, because somebody is sorting them while the presentation is due to start. Voting from phones solves the counting and moves all the difficulty into deciding who is allowed to vote.
Where the pricing bites
Awards tooling is commonly sold as an add-on, licensed per event or per judging device, and public voting is often charged per vote cast. That last shape is worth noticing, because it means the better attended your show is, the more the awards cost to hand out, for software doing identical work.
The devices are frequently hired by the weekend as well, so a club running several panels pays for the hardware and the licence together, once a year, for a single day of use.
What good looks like on the day
- The award list is ready before the presentation rather than being added up during it.
- Judged classes and the public vote are counted separately and land in the same list.
- A late entry or a class change reaches the judge's sheet without a phone call.
- The committee can see progress: which classes are scored, and which panel is behind.
- Results and comments can go to entrants afterwards from the same records.
Before changing anything, work out what the awards side costs across a whole year, including the event licence, the device hire and any per-vote charge. Our software bill calculator, a free calculator, turns per-event and per-unit pricing into yearly and three-year totals.
If that figure is small, renting is the right answer and we will say so. If it is not, judging is a strong candidate to own, because the rules are yours and no two clubs share them. Our guide to owning your software covers where custom pays and where it does not, and our page for car shows and concours describes the rest of the weekend, including what we would leave rented.