Write-In Ballots?

Because our elections are being held in the middle of the summer, at least two citizens so far have said to me that they won't be able to access broadband on the weekend of July 30/31. Of course, others may as well.

Can we supplement our voting system with a "absentee" ballot procedure? We now have 17 signed and paid citizens; every vote will really count.


Sudane

This is just a suggestion, but as far as I understand it, other than using a simulation of a voting booth to recieve the equivalent of our voting cards (PIN numbers), that our election system is closer to a simulation of a RL "electronic" system which is ideally suited for, and partially intended to serve as, an absentee voting system.

What I mean is that voting on the web, is often put forward in RL as the solution to this very problem. Given that, an extension of the length of the web voting to something more like a week would mostly solve the problem I think.

This would leave the same simple electoral process in place but give a much wider window of opportunity to vote. Citizens would have to be present in Neualtenburg "in person" at least once to obtain their PIN from a voting booth, and have to be able to get on to the Internet only for a few seconds or so during the period of the voting, (possibly a period of one week). I think that would be fair.

Perhaps folks would be on vacation for that whole week, but there has to be a line somewhere. The task of getting to that web page for the few seconds required to vote within the week period should not be insurmountable for anyone who really wants to vote.

If the voting booths themselves are only available during the same voting period, (I am not sure on that point), then this idea would also likely require that the PIN numbers be available on the Internet as well as in the booth. So it might be that we would have to ditch the voting booth simulation completely if that was the case, or at least it would become a redundant feature.

Alternatively, and possibly my favorite, we could have two paralell systems and have web voting to enable absentee voters together with an enhanced voting booth simulation wherein citizens could not only obtain their PIN but actually vote in the booth "in person." I am really vague on the details of how that enhancement could be done or made secure but I personally would love to be able to vote in the booth. Possibly this is one of the first good uses for the "web on a prim" technology in that the voting booth simulation could be linked directly to the secure web voting system.

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I haven't tested the "voting booth" yet, but I fail to understand how we could "vote by proxy" using the same system as we used last time. Hmm. This would need some coding from Ulrika, I guess. Dianne's suggestions are good - getting some sort of special password that you could use to "vote on the Web".

I'm not so sure if we can do that for the upcoming elections, however - but perhaps we can do it for the next ones? Just a thought... I know programming things takes a lot of time

The least I could suggest is to make the voting booth available for a longer period of time...

I just wanted to follow up on this. I can allow absentee voting without any additional coding by sending folks a PIN by email. I plan on sending out three by email today.

~Ulrika~

I modified the system (it took 10 minutes) to support a simple absentee ballot list. I then emailed out instructions and PINs to three members without broadband access.

~Ulrika~