Voting

This is the voting system for HackSoc committee elections. It uses single transferrable vote (or more specifically, instant-runoff voting, which is the single-winner equivalent of STV), and is designed so that nobody can possibly detect who cast which ballot.

It is made of three web servers. Two are user-facing and the third is an admin panel for us to check the winners.

• The registration server asks members to enter their student ID, verifies it against the database, and then generates them an empty ballot.
• The ballot server lets members fill in their ballot and submit it to the database.
• The admin panel server lets us see the winners at any point during the election, and also the amount of votes and ballots given out.

Holding an Election

A few things need to be in place to run an election.

• Each of the three servers should be running separately, ideally on different machines. The registration, ballot, and admin servers run on ports :10000, :10001, and :10002 respectively.
• A reverse proxy should be set up so that the three servers can be accessed at /register, /ballot, and /admin.
• The MongoDB database credentials and URL need to be provided as environment variables MONGO_USER, MONGO_PASS, and MONGO_URL.
  • There should be one database, "Hacksoc", with four collections, members, ballots, candidates, and members_voted.
  • members should be a collection of all members with at least an ID field for the student ID.
  • candidates should be a collection of all committee positions to fill, e.g.

    {
       "role": "President",
       "candidates": ["Candidate 1", "Candidate 2", "Candidate 3", "Re-open Nominations"],
       "index": 0
    }

  • The other two collections should start off empty.

Contributing

I've added a VS code workspace file in the root of this repository to make it easier to work with in VS code at least - the VS code Go plugin is funny about multiple Go modules existing in the same workspace folder.