Re: Spec for anonymous voting

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Dave Neary wrote:

> PS. James, do you have any time to take this on? (in case anyone
> failed to notice, I'm not planning on doing it, and want someone to
> volunteer).

I don't know whether I'll have time to do it, but I put some of my
thoughts up here:
    http://live.gnome.org/AnonymousVoting

I started by writing down a few requirements, then looked at how the
existing system could be adapted to satisfy the additional anonymous
voting requirement.

I think the best way to do this is by having the vote gnome org email
address call a script rather than just sending everything to a private
mailing list and parsing that later on.  It has the following benefits:

    * The vote can be checked immediately, and the voter can be told
      immediately if their vote has been rejected.  Conversely, it can
      tell the voter how it interpreted the ballot.
    * The personally identifying parts of the ballot can be stripped off
      as early as possible.
    * Completed ballots can be normalised up front, simplifying the
      counting scripts.
    * It can immediately discard messages that don't look anything like
      ballots, so there won't be any spam in the results released at the
      end of the election.

If there's anything you think should be added to the page, go ahead and
make the changes.

James.