Aside from trying to get everyone to type their nomination, but only hit enter " in 3"? No, and I would really love to know what others do as well. 

If someone isn't at their computer, then I have them go first verbally and I type theirs in after I check with everyone to confirm they have their nominations decided. Clunky for sure.

What an interesting conundrum in our age of technology!

I might suggest either a text or instant message to the facilitator only as that is the Role which will read each nomination aloud once all have been submitted. Even if someone is away from their computer, it is likely they may have texting ability if they are on a cell phone during the meeting.

I agree with Rebecca: everyone send a chat message to the Facilitator with the name of the person nominated and then the Facilitator reads it out loud and asks why she nominated this person.

We use Google forms that populate a google sheet. The form has fields for

1 who would you like to nominate for Secretary and who would you like to nominate for Facilitator. Google saves the nominator and time automatically because they are logged in to their google drive account. 

Wow, great ideas - we did in fact use the 'private chat message to Facilitator' approach and it worked fairly well, except one of our members was on via phone, so we had him state verbally, after all the texts were received, then the Facilitator asked him the 'why' question first.  Not too bad.  

I also like Tyler's Google form - I'm using those a great deal in other contexts and will discuss it with our new Secretary.

That's right - you heard it here first - I've been Secretary since Aug 2014 and am no more.  Anchor Circle Facilitator at your service!

Thanks Keith I love the private chat to the facilitator idea will try it at my next election