[Osmf-talk] Election results

[Paul Norman]

On 12/14/2016 2:07 PM, Oleksiy Muzalyev wrote:
> Now speaking of technical side of the election, I looked up at the 
> https://www.opavote.com/ and could not find a geographical 
> visualization of the vote. It would be interesting to see how voted 
> different countries and regions. In traditional elections such maps 
> are widely used [1], but it seems not for an election in a GIS 
> community. The cobbler's children are the worst shod - phenomenon? It 
> is possible to record an IP address of a voter, calculate statistics, 
> and display it on a map in real time, with the number of people who 
> voted and still expected to vote.

There are no plans to produce such a map. In political elections voting 
is typically organized by small geographical area. This is not the case 
for our elections, where all the voters are in one pool. Additionally, 
political elections have thousands of times more people voting, so it's 
easier to report information without having to worry about privacy.

It might be possible to look at turnout by country by matching the list 
of who voted against the membership list. I don't know the capabilities 
of the voting platform, but this might need to be done manually. 
Additionally, privacy considerations might make this impossible.

> I could nod find a possibility to check if the vote for my token 
> "gS...Txju5tQl...jcUb9zu...", which I received by e-mail as part of 
> the URL, was registered correctly in the database. I think it would 
> take a month or two to write an open source script for such an 
> election with real time geographical visualization, with a possibility 
> to check the correctness of a vote for the own token. I might err, 
> perhaps, there is a pitfall, and "underwater rock", something related 
> to security or a legal issue. But so far it looks straightforward to me. 

Paying someone to develop software like that would seem well outside the 
scope of what the OSMF does when there are alternatives. Even the most 
expensive options for having someone run the election are under 1000 GBP.