[OSGeo-Discuss] Voting process (Re: OSGeo Membership and/or upcoming elections)

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2014-05-16, 12:06 PM, Jeff McKenna wrote:
> 
> - maybe this is the most interesting, the Open Source Initiative used
> "evote" (https://github.com/mdipierro/evote), will paste the full email
> from OSI:
> 
> ****
> At the Open Source Initiative, we just used E-Vote to conduct a member
> election, and I was pretty happy with the process (I was the admin):
> 
>   https://elections.opensource.org/
> 
> We contracted with E-Vote's author, Massimo DiPierro, to set it up for
> us, which he did a fine job of.  I expect we'll continue to use it.
> 
> It does use people's email addresses to send them their ballots, but the
> ballots themselves are anonymous.  (Technically, the election admin
> could use database access to figure out who did what, I suppose, but
> that's the only point of trust; the election itself can be verified by
> others without anyone's identities or votes being revealed.)
> ****
> 
More on the evote project (I wonder if we should contact Massimo), the
'features' listed on the OSI site:

- The system is open source and anybody can check the source code. The
code is small and written in the Python language. This makes it easy for
professionals in the field to check it.

- The system can run as a service and one installation can run mutiple
elections. Anybody can login into the system, create a new election,
register voters and managers, and customize the ballot using an easy to
use WYSIWYG interface.

- The system communicates with voters and managers by email.

- Voters do not need to login into the system to vote. They only need to
click on the link in the notification email, fill a web form and submit.

- Each voter can only vote once per election.

- Results are computed automatically at closing of the election and
published.

- Voting is completely anonymous. Even a hacker with a complete database
dump of the system would not be able to link voters to ballots.

- Each voter can check at any time that his vote has been properly
recorded and not alatered.

- Each voter can independenty and at any time perform an election recount.

- Upon voting, each voter receives an email recipt containing a copy of
their filled and anonymized ballot.

- Managers are notified by email when a new vote is cast and receive a
copy of the anonimized ballot.

- All ballots, anonymized and digitally signed, are published, along
with instruciton to verify the digital signature.



-jeff