VOITNG: Anonymous voting - suggested solution from user

[BeccaMelhuish]

@ilmartyrk @kevincrepin

As we know, some users really want to have anonymous voting. In a test, one user made a suggestion for how this could work, which seems quite a simple solution to me.

She suggested that you could just tick a box when setting up the vote to say that you didn't want access to the voting data. This would mean you would still see the vote results graph in the topic, under the 'Vote' tab as usual, but you wouldn't have access to download the voting spreadsheet in which the names are presented.

I.e. ticking it would mean that this link wouldn't appear:

Obviously this would only work for soft voting though.

Alternatively, if we are going for the set-up I've suggested in this issue, could we just set it so that if someone has ticked a box to say they want it anonymous, then the spreadsheet doesn't include this column:

I'm thinking the user ID column could stay, as no-one outside of COS has access to these IDs I guess?

This second option would be preferable I think, as it would still mean the votes could be analysed in other ways, if needed.

@ilmartyrk for hard voting, I guess it's pretty impossible, as the PNOE files include the name of the person who signed it? So the only solution would be us submitting the container on their behalf?

[BeccaMelhuish]

@ilmartyrk @ssin1901 Will move this to 'soon' as seems like a potentially quite simple fix for something users have been asking for for a long time :)

[ssin1901]

@BeccaMelhuish I think this a wonderful idea. However, my suggestion (perhaps what the user suggested but visualised for simplicity) would be to add the checkbox to "3.Voting systems" (screenshot1). In that case, this would be the view once the voting has been closed (screenshot2)

[BeccaMelhuish]

@ssin1901 Great glad you think so! And yes exactly that - they'd choose whether or not it's anonymous in settings, and then either not see the 'Download voting results', or get a spreadsheet with the names column missing (the latter probably preferable, for analysis) :)