Voting Systems for the Occupy Movement

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wildthought's picture

I am a technology organizer with Occupy Philadelphia. I want to explore how we can expand voting to include online members. Right now, we have daily votes at a General Assembly. Votes are by hand among people in the crowd.

The idea would be to allow people to have a voter card for online voting. An onsite administrator would take an email address. That address plus non-identifying information (childhood best friend, etc..) would need to be entered before every vote. Only pre-registered email addresses would be able to vote. Pre-Registered voters would be required to re-register on a monthly basis. We would want the live vote to be counted and reflected on the website first. In this way we would allow online voters to be informed by the community consensus on the ground. Once live voting was finished and recorded we would open the vote up to the community. So if an issue got 235 in favor and 134 opposed with the live community those numbers would need to be batch entered before online voting could begin.

In order to accomplish this we would need interfaces to update vote totals, register live batch votes, sign up voters, and user registration.

Can folks start discussing the best way to accomplish this above task. We are also looking for volunteers and have a dev environment set up for folks to help us.

Comments

Thoughts on Voting

edcetera's picture

We've been having a long chat about this on the occupy-dev list: https://lists.takethesquare.net/pipermail/occupy-dev/2011-November/threa... although some of it is a little abstract. In short, Occupy Chicago wants to use encrypted retina scans as authentication, which of course opens up a completely different set of issues. Regardless, we have been thinking about developing the basic system (however auth is managed) as a Drupal site, so I think perhaps we should join forces.

Online voting for Occupation Philly

philly_bob's picture

I've been looking at the same issue (at the same location) on a separate track.

I do "play by play" on the Occupation Philly Livestream Chat during General Assemblies. Occasionally, we take online polls of chatters during the long, boring hub-bub of GA "breakout groups." These online informal polls are completely insecure, but once an enthusiastic camera op included it in the vote total! Luckily, it didn't change the outcome. We have since agreed not to allow online voting via Livestream Chat.

Anyway, I've been experimenting with Cornell's Condorcet voting system, which is based on unique email addresses. Nothing as fancy as retinal scans. I was thinking that maybe our internal working group email lists -- bloated as they are -- could serve as the voting population.

The Condorcet voting system is located at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/

Our Facilitation Working Group today unanimously agreed to allow me to run a simple "ordering an Italian dinner" demonstration this weekend with our Facilitation list of emails.

I am not sure whether retina

Tafa's picture

I am not sure whether retina scans is the way forward as it does indeed open up a set of issues which may not go well with a lot of people. However, there is a cheaper, secured and consistent way in the form of QR codes. See http://drupal.org/project/mobile_codes for more information.
So, basically, what you'll be doing will be to print out some QR codes, put them all across your occupy site and have people vote using their mobile phones. In this way, you get people to vote and have their vote accounted on your website.

T

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