Vote, Idea
A vote in Salesforce Ideas is a promote or demote action that a community member casts on an idea to raise or lower its score.
Definition
A vote in Salesforce Ideas is a promote or demote action that a community member casts on an idea to raise or lower its score. Each promote adds 10 points to the idea, and each demote subtracts 10 points. The combined points decide where an idea sits in the popularity ranking, so the suggestions a community cares about most float to the top of the list.
Voting is an older Salesforce feature. It belongs to the Ideas application that ships with Experience Cloud sites and the internal Ideas tab. Most teams that run feedback programs today reach for newer options first, such as Experience Cloud discussion features, Chatter, or a dedicated idea-management product. Even so, the Idea and Vote objects remain part of the platform, and plenty of orgs still run live Ideas communities built around this voting model.
How an Idea Vote moves the score
Promote, demote, and the 10-point rule
A vote is not a free-form rating. It is one of two fixed actions. When a member agrees with an idea, they click Promote, and Salesforce adds 10 points to that idea's score. When a member disagrees, they click Demote, and Salesforce removes 10 points. There is no half vote and no slider. Every vote is worth exactly 10 points in one direction or the other. The rules around voting are strict on purpose. A member can promote an idea only once, and they cannot promote an idea they have already demoted. The reverse holds too, so a single person cannot stack votes to inflate a score. This one-vote-per-person limit keeps the ranking honest. It means a high score reflects many separate supporters, not one enthusiastic user clicking repeatedly. An idea can end up with a negative score when more people demote it than promote it, which is a useful signal that the community actively dislikes a suggestion rather than simply ignoring it.
The automatic vote when you post
Posting an idea counts as your first vote for it. The moment a member submits a new idea, Salesforce casts a promote vote on their behalf and adds 10 points to the score. This is why a brand-new idea never starts at zero. It opens at 10 points, carried by the author's own implied support. That automatic vote shapes how you read early numbers. An idea sitting at 10 points has one supporter, the person who wrote it, and nobody else has weighed in yet. An idea at 50 points has gathered four more promoters on top of the author. Knowing the baseline matters when you compare ideas, because the first 10 points always come from the submission itself rather than from community traction. When you scan a list of fresh ideas, treat anything still at 10 as untested, and watch for the ones that climb past it quickly. Those are the suggestions pulling in real votes from people other than the author.
The Vote object behind the click
Each vote is stored as a record in the Vote object, which the API has exposed since version 13. The Vote object is shared across features, so it represents a vote on an Idea, a Reply, or a Knowledge Article rather than ideas alone. The Type field holds the direction of the vote, with values such as Up and Down that map to promote and demote in the Ideas user interface. The ParentId field ties the vote to the record it belongs to, which is the idea in this case. Because Vote is a polymorphic child, queries against it have rules. When you write SOQL against the Vote object, you generally filter on a single ParentId or on Parent.Type so the platform knows which kind of parent you mean. The running totals you see on an idea, including its score and its vote count, are summary fields on the Idea object itself. Salesforce maintains those totals as votes come and go, so you rarely aggregate raw Vote rows by hand to display a score.
Score, popularity, and why they differ
It is tempting to treat the point score as the popularity ranking, but Ideas separates the two. The raw score is a simple running tally of promotes minus demotes, multiplied by 10. Popularity is a time-weighted view that favors ideas with recent voting activity over ones that piled up points long ago and then went quiet. This design stops a single old idea from dominating the Popular list forever. An idea that earned hundreds of points two years ago will slide down the popularity view as newer ideas attract fresh votes, even if the older idea still has a higher raw total. The effect rewards momentum. Communities surface what people are voting on now, not just what they voted on once. When you report on a feedback program, pull both numbers. The raw score tells you lifetime support, and the popularity position tells you what the community is rallying behind this week. Reading only one of them gives a partial picture and can send a roadmap conversation in the wrong direction.
Where voting lives: Ideas in context
Voting does not exist on its own. It is one piece of the Ideas application, which lets a community post suggestions, sort them into categories, comment on them, and watch administrators move them through statuses such as Under Consideration or Delivered. Ideas runs in two places. It appears as a tab inside the internal Salesforce app, and it appears as Ideas pages inside Experience Cloud sites built for customers or partners. The voting model is what turns that collection of posts into a prioritized queue. Comments capture nuance and debate, while votes give a single comparable number across every idea in the zone. Administrators often pair the two. They read the comment thread to understand the why, then look at the vote score to gauge how many people share the need. A healthy Ideas community keeps both signals active, because votes without discussion lose context, and discussion without votes loses any sense of scale.
Using votes without letting them rule the roadmap
Vote counts are an input to product decisions, not the decision itself. A high score tells you an idea resonates with the people who happen to use your community, but those voters are rarely a representative sample of your whole customer base. The loudest segment is not always the largest one, and the most valuable change for the business may sit on an idea with a modest score. Mature feedback teams weigh votes against feasibility, cost, strategic fit, and the needs of customers who never log in to vote at all. They use the top-voted list as a starting agenda for roadmap reviews, not as a ranked build order. They also close the loop. When an idea is shipped or declined, updating its status tells voters their input was read, which keeps people voting on the next round. A community that votes into a void quickly stops voting, and a dead Ideas zone gives you no signal at all. Treat the vote tally as a conversation starter that earns its value only when you respond to it.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Vote on IdeasSalesforce
- Vote | Object Reference for the Salesforce PlatformSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Vote, Idea.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Vote, Idea.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is a Vote on an Idea?
Q2. What do votes drive?
Q3. How should product teams use votes?
Discussion
Loading discussion…