OpenSlides Voting Plugin

This plugin provides electronic voting of motions and elections for OpenSlides. It's a further development of the outdated OpenSlides VoteCollector Plugin.

Requirements

• OpenSlides 2.3
• VoteCollector 1.10.2+ (for voting modes with keypads)

Features

• Electronic voting for motions and elections in OpenSlides with 4 voting modes (see below)
• Supports the voting software 'VoteCollector' for using hardware keypads of Voteworks with OpenSlides.
• Overview with single votes for verification of each vote.
• Visualize live voting as delegate board on projector.
• Allows list of speakers voting (add/remove as speaker), with VoteCollector only.
• Supports multiple voting shares per delegate.
• Supports proxies/principals and absentee votes.

Voting modes

On creation of any poll (motions and election) you will be ask which voting mode this poll has. You can choose between four modes:

1. Analog voting: Just enter the offline counted votes, so the assembly can see the result.
2. Named electronic voting: Every delegate needs an OpenSlides login and can vote inside of OpenSlides. It's a public vote. The name of delegate is saved to the vote. This can be pseudo-anonymized later (delete the association between user and the vote, but remember, there might be ways to reconstruct it later).
3. Token-based electronic voting: This is a mode for polling booths. Delegates don't need an own OpenSlides login. There have to be a few OpenSlides voting machines where delegates can vote by entering a valid voting token. The voting tokens are randomly generated by the voting manager. After authenticating the delegates they get the activated voting token. After voting you get a (short, randomly generated) result number to verify your own vote in a list of all votes.
4. VoteCollector: If you have voting devices (keypads) that supports the VoteCollector, you can enable the VoteCollector mode in the settings. Note that not all voting methods (like yes/no/abstain for multiple candidates) are supported by the VoteCollector. See below for more details.

Token-based voting interface

To run the token-based voting interface on voting machines you need to create an own OpenSlides login, so OpenSlides can validate that the votes comes from an authorized computer.

Create a new user group (e.g. 'voting') which has only three permissions: Can see motions, Can see assignments and Can see the token voting interface. Add this new group to a new created voting user. Now, login with this user account on voting machines.

Important: Do not give any delegate the permission Can see the token voting interface - otherwise they can see no longer the default OpenSlides interface but see always the voting interface.

If anyone should be allowed to vote at their own computer, please make a voting user with a simple password and distribute that, so a user has to login seperatly to vote. Note, that this may reveal the users vote because one can check from which computer came the vote and check if a user was logged in on the computer before.

Add VOTING_RESULT_TOKEN_TIMEOUT to settings.py if you want to change the timeout in seconds until vote success view is closed during token-based voting. The timeout is important so the next one cannot get the result number if the user didn't click on continue. The result number view can be disabled by setting the timeout to 0.

VoteCollector supported voting modes

• Yes/No/Abstain for motions
• Yes/No(/Abstain) for elections with just one candidate
• 1-of-n elections (choose one from many candidates), supports also abstain (key '0') and invalid votes (key > n)
• Yes/No for list of speakers voting (add/remove as speaker)

Not supported is Yes/No(/Abstain) for multiple candidates.

Configure SECRET_KEY in VoteCollector

The VoteCollector sends the POST requests (with the important voting results) protected to the OpenSlides server. OpenSlides and VoteCollector supports HMAC - a hashed-based message authentication code using the secret key of OpenSlides. To use the VoteCollector successfully with OpenSlides you have to insert the SECRET_KEY from OpenSlides' settings.py into VoteCollector.exe.config. If no secret key used in VoteCollector you get an error if you start a new voting.

Installation

OpenSlides portable for Windows

To install the plugin in a OpenSlides portable for Windows:

• Download and extract the zip archive of the latest plugin release from files.openslides.org.
• Copy the openslides_voting directory into openslides\plugins of your OpenSlides portable.
• Restart OpenSlides server.

Install via pypi

To install the plugin in a python environment run::

pip install openslides-voting

Install for development

Set up Openslides as described in DEVELOPMENT.rst of OpenSlides. Then fork and clone this plugin repository. Create a symlink from the openslides_voting folder into the OpenSlides folder from the main OpenSlides repo:

ls -s /<full path>/openslides-voting/openslides_voting /<full path>/OpenSlides/openslides_voting

Add openslides_voting in your settings.py to INSTALLED_PLUGINS.

Then, from the openslides-voting directory, run yarn and for further development a watcher:

node_modules/.bin/gulp watch

Happy Contributing!