[Osmf-talk] Election results

[Guillaume Rischard]

I understand what you’re saying - we know how to write software, this is simple software, let’s scratch our own itch.

One big advantage of having third-party voting software is that it completely avoids potential conflicts of interest.

The opavote people don’t care what the outcome of the election is. They have no incentive to make the vote go one way or the other.

If we run our own election software, we have to blindly trust Dermot, the board, the Operations team, and whoever writes the software. Which I do — but it’s even better if the question can’t even be asked.

Guillaume

> On 15 Dec 2016, at 11:05, Oleksiy Muzalyev <oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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