Voting Infrastructure SOP

Contents

Contact Information

Owner

Fedora Infrastructure Team

Contact

#fedora-admin, elections

Servers

elections0\{1,2}, elections01.stg, db02

Purpose

Provides a system for voting on Fedora matters

Creating a new election

Creating the elections

  • Log in

  • Go to "Admin" in the menu at the top, select "Create new election" and fill in the form.

  • The "usefas" option results in candidate names being looked up as FAS usernames an displayed as their real name.

  • An alias should be added when creating a new election as this is used in the link on the page of listed elections on the frontpage.

  • Complete the election form:

    Alias

    A short name for the election. It is the name that will be used in the templates.

    Example: FESCo2014

    Summary

    A simple name that will be used in the URLs and as in the links in the application

    Example: FESCo elections 2014

    Description

    A short description about the elections that will be displayed above the choices in the voting page

    Type

    Allow setting the types of elections (more on that below)

    Maxium Range/Votes

    Allow setting options for some election type (more on that below)

    URL

    A URL pointing to more information about the election

    Example: the wiki page presenting the election

    Start Date

    The Start of the elections (UTC)

    End Date

    The Close of the elections (UTC)

    Number Elected

    The number of seats that will be selected among the candidates after the election

    Candidates are FAS users?

    Checkbox allowing integration between FAS account and their names retrieved from FAS.

    Embargo results

    If this is set then it will require manual intervention to release the results of the election

    Legal voters groups

    Used to restrict the votes to one or more FAS groups.

    Admin groups

    Give admin rights on that election to one or more FAS groups

Adding Candidates

The list of all the elections can be found at voting/admin/

Click on the election of interest and and select "Add a candidate".

Each candidate is added with a name and an URL. The name can be his/her FAS username (interesting if the checkbox that candidates are FAS users has been checked when creating the calendar) or something else.

The URL can be a reference to the wiki page where they nominated themselves.

This will add extra candidates to the available list.

Who can vote

If no 'Legal voters groups' have been defined when creating the election, the election will be opened to anyone having signed the CLA and being in one other group (commonly referred to CLA+1).

Modifying an Election

Changing the details of an Election

This page can also be used to verify details of an election before it opens for voting.

The list of all the elections can be found at /voting/admin/

After finding the right election, click on it to have the overview and select "Edit election" under the description.

Edit a candidate

On the election overview page found via /voting/admin/ (and clicking on the election of interest), next to each candidate is an edit button allowing the admins to edit the information relative to the candidate.

Removing a candidate

On the election overview page found via /voting/admin/ (and clicking on the election of interest), next to each candidate is an x button allowing the admins to remove the candidatei from the election.

Releasing the results of an embargoed election

Visit the elections admin interface and edit the election to uncheck the 'Embargo results?' checkbox.

Results

Admins have early access to the results of the elections (regardless of the embargo status).

The list of the closed elections can be found at /voting/archives.

Find there the election of interest and click on the "Results" link in the last column of the table. This will show you the Results page included who was elected based on the number of seats elected entered when creating the election.

You may use these information to send out the results email.

Legacy

The information below should now be included in the Results page (see above) but I left them here in case.

Other things you might need to query

The current election software doesn’t retrieve all of the information that we like to include in our results emails. So we have to query the database for the extra information. You can use something like this to retrieve the total number of voters for the election:

SELECT e.id, e.shortdesc, COUNT(distinct v.voter) FROM elections AS e LEFT
JOIN votes AS v ON e.id=v.election_id WHERE e.shortdesc in ('FAmSCo - February
2014') GROUP BY e.id, e.shortdesc;

You may also want to include the vote tally per candidate for convenience when the FPL emails the election results:

SELECT e.id, e.shortdesc, c.name, c.novotes FROM elections AS e LEFT JOIN
fvotecount AS c ON e.id=c.election_id WHERE e.shortdesc in ('FAmSCo - February
2014', 'FESCo - February 2014') ;

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