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Election Officiating Guidelines

Revision as of 10:14, 10 September 2013 by ThierryCarrez (talk | contribs)

Pick election officials

Election officials should not run for election themselves. Ideally they should also have no interest in the election outcome (to preserve neutrality) but that is generally harder to achieve.

Set up the election

You should create a wiki page describing the election, the election official(s), the timeline, who can apply, who can vote and the method that wil be used for voting (and breaking ties, see below).

See for an example: PTL_Elections_Fall_2013

This page should be advertised on the appropriate mailing-list.

Generate a list of voters

run `git log --pretty=%ae --since '1 year ago' | sort -u` - for whatever time frame you need to generate your voters list send the list of voters to the election officator, or confirm with project the list is accurate.

Request self-nomination

For elections with open candidates, we generally use a self-nomination mechanism (eligible candidates who want to run send an email stating their intent, and potentially describing their platform, to a per-determined mailing-list). This avoids having to confirm candidates when they are nominated by third-parties, which is a painful and time-consuming process.

You should allow sufficient time (at least a week) for self-nominations.

Running the election itself

Get Familiar with the Voting Application

Most OpenStack elections use the Condorcet Internet Voting Service: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/ Start by reading the FAQs: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/faq.html

Create the Poll

Then set up the poll: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/civs_create.html

  • Name of the Poll
  • Name of supervisor (election official)
  • E-mail address of supervisor (election official)
  • Day and time you plan to stop the poll - manual ending
  • Description of poll
  • Names of Candidates
  • Upload file from gerrit of eligible voters (see generate a list of voters above) - 1000 voters maximum.
  • Check the Enable detailed ballot reporting box in the options section


You should allow sufficient time (at least a week) for voting.

Note: CIVS uses the vote admin locale to generate voting emails. For example, if you start the election from a Firefox in a French locale, you'll send out voting links emails in French. To avoid that, please set your browser locale to US english before you start an election.

Run the Election

After you create the poll, civs will send an email to the address of the supervisor. The email will contain a link to a webpage which allows the supervisor to conduct the election. There is a button to start the poll, which once started becomes a button to end the poll. All the information contained in the poll is there, except the list of voters, civs doesn't save the list. There is a text box to add email addresses for additional voters. Save the link from the email, civs has no way to get you another one if yours is lost.

Breaking ties

Condorcet voting may generate ties. We advise to break them using Governance/TieBreaking.