Secret electronic Ballots

[timbo343]

We are looking to set up a secret electronic ballot for parents to vote however it needs to meet the following:

 

- parent email addresses must only be allowed to vote once

- parents must not be able to see the results

- Only the head teacher must be able to see the results

- The head teacher must not be able to see which parent / email address has voted or seen who they have voted for

- parents must not be able to see other parent email addresses

- must be free or low cost

 

Google forms doesn't offer anything.

 

The closest thing i found was adoodle.org however the body of the email that parents receive contains other parent's email addresses.

[mavhc]

Are you looking for actually anonymous, or causually anonymous?

 

You could just write a thing to process the results and remove the email address before anyone sees it for the second option

 

For the first you'd need some kind of advanced homomorphic encryption.

 

But half way there would just be to email a load of tokens (random numbers), and not record who got which. Then use those tokens to access the questionaire

[synaesthesia]

Donald?

[Wubbalubbadub]

Donald?

This made me laugh out loud!

[msi_school]

You can do an anonymous survey in Microsoft forms limited to internal users and the results can be restricted to one user if you have Office 365

[TechMonkey]

We have used LimeSurvey in the past for this. It does proper tokens so can limit entries and dissociates emails from results.

[timbo343]

LimeSurvey looks the ticket for is but its got a steep learning curve and it's expensive for just one survey (parent governor elections).

 

MS Office teams would have worked but it's limitations put it in the no good category just like google forms.

 

We would need it fully annon as no one apart from head teacher can see the final results and cannot see which parents voted for who.

[Steve21]

Depending how often you're going to be using this, could you just re-design your thoughts on how it's going to be done. Might take a bit more work, but rather than re-designing the wheel etc

 

Generate random long codes for each parent. Get codes emailed to parent, insert person who knows code linked to parent (HR/admin/IT etc) (assuming you have something like schoolcomms/intouch etc).

 

The Form/Survey is public, but without emails being put in, but one of the options is for the auth code to be used (So like enter code: )

 

You can then just filter said results and remove any which don't have an authorised code

 

Then head won't know which code was which parent etc, and IT/HR/Admin person won't know results as it's unknown who those codes are linked to

 

Steve

[MatthewL]

Can Survey Monkey be used for this?

[timbo343]

Can Survey Monkey be used for this?

I was told that SurveyMonkey allows for one time voting however you can see what each voter has chosen - i am open to be told i've been told wrong information on this.

[Sanchez]

I did this once with Google Forms. Used text validation to essentially make a password box to start the form. Used a random number formula in a spreadsheet to create passcodes and format them for the validation syntax.

Assigned each email to a code and then deleted the file once the emails were sent.

 

Once the results were in we removed any with duplicate passcodes ( we informed parents that only the most recent result would be counted in case they wanted to change their vote.)

 

Although not truly anonymous (outgoing email logs & vault recording the spreadsheet) nobody could access the data without going through me.

[timbo343]

I don't want anything to do with is at all. With it been annoymous someone could kick up a right stink.

 

Maybe it's been blown out of proportian but if i dont have amy access to it i caanot be accused of anything.

 

We have since decided to do this via paper forms.

[mavhc]

Make sure no one does handwriting analysis, or extracts dna from the envelopes, or a time based analysis based on when each form was returned.

 

Of course this is forgetting that everyone knows who that one person is who complains all the time, even when they don't write their name anywhere

[timbo343]

You won't believe it but the returns have to be quarantined for 72 hours [emoji23]

 

Will the same apply when we send the forms out? Probably not.

Edited November 5, 2020 by timbo343

[MatthewL]

I've never used SurveyMonkey from that side of things so wasn't sure @timbo343.

 

All sounds more hassle than its worth.

[timbo343]

I've never used SurveyMonkey from that side of things so wasn't sure @timbo343.

 

All sounds more hassle than its worth.

 

Yup very much so. It's only done once every 4 years.

 

It's a bit like voting for the union's boss or whatever we get through the post. Mine just go in the bin [emoji23]

Edited November 5, 2020 by timbo343

[fiza]

Have you looked at some of the online voting systems? https://www.choicevoting.co.uk/

[p858snake]

Our work used GoVote for our EBA process, Another website used electionrunner for their committee voting situation (although I can't vouch for the backend systems for either)