On 22 Jan 2010, at 06:23, David Kessens wrote:
- Election using single transferable vote (we need to figure out whether we can do this online or wheter this is better done at the meeting)
We do both in EIX. We setup a gmail account for the receipt of votes for external voters, this is accessed by the vote taker, in our case we have asked Roland Perry to do it both times. He is not NCC staff, although he is a consultant to them, independent and outside the operational arena but a known member of the community. We also print out voting papers for people to use at the meeting and distribute and collect them using volunteers. Roland then takes the voting papers and a laptop to a different room to do the count, using STV, Single Transferable Vote. The software we use is from the Electoral Reform Society in the UK, http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/ . More details on STV can be found here - http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=48 . The software is available at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/estv.htm To run an election for a WG the registered version of the software would be required as it will hopefully have more than 50 voters. The count usually takes around half an hour and Roland announces the result to the WG. We usually run the vote in the second session allowing time for people to have a last minute nomination in the first session. We rely on people's honesty to not vote by email and on paper, the election results so far have been sufficiently clear that ballot stuffing of the received email votes would have made no difference. HTH f