[Osmf-talk] Election results

[Oleksiy Muzalyev]

On 15.12.2016 11:23, Paul Norman wrote:
> 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.
>
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I am sure there would be volunteers to write an open source voting 
software with map visualization if there were a leadership decision. It 
is an interesting generic task. Here is, for example, a commercial 
polling system with a heatmap of votes by location: 
http://www.poll-maker.com/

However, the privacy and security issues would be indeed very hard, 
probably, impossible to solve. Any interesting feature would be a 
potential vulnerability. Even a security feature, like verifying own 
vote could be a potential vulnerability as was clearly demonstrated in 
previous messages.

With best regards,

Oleksiy