There are a few concepts you should be familiar with to understand how to set up and administer your ballots on TallySpace.
The first thing you'll do when setting up a vote or survey is create a ballot. A ballot is simply a collection of one or more Categories. It's useful to group categories into a ballot because you can set security requirements on a per-ballot basis, which will allow voters to log in once to vote on multiple cateogories.
Categories (or questions) are individual things voters vote on. Each category may contain multiple choices or candidates (or none at all, in the case of a write-in category).
Categories on the same ballot can have different security settings, which allows you to set up a single ballot where some voters can see/vote on some categories, but not others.
Each category can contain one or more choices (or candidates). These are the options voters choose from when casting their votes.
Contacts most typically contain a list of approved voters. Importing or entering a contact list allows voters to log in with information they already know, without the hassle of having to sign up for an account on their own.
For categories with a large number of choices, you can also populate the choices from your contacts list.
TallySpace allows you to import or track any information about your contacts you like. This makes it a breeze to control who can vote on each category in a very granular way. "Grade Level" is an example of a cusotm field - in many cases a school will only want to allow 12th graders to vote for 12th grade president. Custom fields are what makes this possible.