Polling System for Community Council and Elections

[janasberger]

for consideration, for temporary (transition council) and permanent adoption (post-election, tbc)

Discussions for the Polling System

We are looking into online voting and decision making systems.

Requirements are:

• Anonymous
• Polling system for decisions in community council, frequent decision-making
• Elections for board with external contributor voters, not frequent

Discussed Options are:

• SecurePoll (WikiTech): Documentation: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SecurePoll; https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SecurePoll
  The SecurePoll extension is a special page extension for Wikipedia for elections, polls and surveys.
  Unfortunately, it is not available for general use - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SecurePoll
• easypoll.bot: Discord Bot, Website: https://easypoll.bot

Please leave any comments regarding the options and any additional systems we could consider here.

[fkiraly]

another option we'd previously used is the anonymous polling tool in slack, but I believe that has been restricted to max 100 votes a month. This is close to the total of votes we would see at the current pace, and is lower than what we'd expect of elections.

Further, one would need to create a channel for each set of voters.

Question is, are the following requirements:

• not seeing the state of the vote while it's ongoing
• 1 big (100s?) vote per year, 20 (dozen or so) small votes per month

[JonathanBechtel]

I actually like easypoll -- don't see why it wouldn't work and strikes me as the path of least resistance for conducting online polls. I need to have some permissions to test it out, but it strikes me as preferable to software that's distinct from discord itself.

[fkiraly]

Update: we've trialled easypoll and it seems to work for simple votes.

Although it is not yet fully clear how we would audit the results, or restrict by eligibility, for applicability in votes or elections.

Right now the procedure seems to be, the one person who sets up the vote reads out the results. That is not "audit safe" - we need ways to check:

• the final result printed out to the electorate, not just to the vote setter
• a verifiable check that everyone voted at most once, and only eligile persons voted

[JonathanBechtel]

To add comments here: I think easypoll is now the default way of performing polls, and we should consider this issue closed, since we've successfully held a few polls.