Ballot: Open Source Electoral Campaigns

It's the election season all around, with elections just around the corner for FOSS United as well. (https://forum.fossunited.org/t/electing-a-fossunited-governing-board/3569)

With this new course of action for the foundation, we had to figure out a solution to conduct an community-wide election.

The key problems we wanted to address:

• We wanted something which can work with the existing platform (https://fossunited.org/)
• Anyone who was signed up with the platform should be able to vote. No new signup flows for voting.
• We wanted to own the data.
• We wanted the whole process to be collaborative with community members.

Out of this need, Ballot was created (https://github.com/harshtandiya/ballot).

Ballot is an open-source web app which enables communities to create and manage election campaigns.

• It is built upon the Frappe Framework (https://github.com/frappe/frappe)
• The front-end is VueJS (https://vuejs.org/) powered.

The app essentially lets users collaborate with other users via team creations. Teams are able to create election campaigns and manage the different aspects of it such as:

• Candidature Forms
• Nominations via others
• Voting mechanics : such as Ranked choice (https://opavote.com/methods/ranked-choice-voting) and Single Transferable Vote (https://opavote.com/methods/single-transferable-vote)

Ballot Docs: https://harshtandiya.github.io/ballot/

In this talk, I will be talking about the:

• What : what Ballot is all about.
• Why: why it was created.
• Who: who it benefits.
• To-Do: Ballot's future prospects.