School Elections Query

[Stephen_UK]

I have had a project dropped on my desk with an urgent deadline (essentially today, although I can probably push it back a day or two) for enabling online voting, in this case for a parent governor election, to supplement the paper ballots

 

In the letter that is going to parents, it is listed as a 2 part process, one to input details to verify the voter (the school have to verify the voter name matches the record we hold for a student/to ensure only one vote is received per person) and then one with the vote - the two cannot be linked. The latter part is all well and good on paper ballot (two envelopes) but is a more challenging issue with online

 

My immediate go to would be a Google or Microsoft Form, but I am unsure if it will satisfy the anonymity aspect. I have also come across School Governor Online Elections – Choice Voting Online STV Voting

 

Has anyone else had experience of doing this and got any recommendations please (particularly anything that could help me in justifying a spend for a "proper" platform for doing this

 

Many Thanks

[NegativeKillDeath]

If you want them to do it online and only be able to vote once you need some sort of unique token for each parent. The difficulty is then how you send each parent the token and not have a record of which token was sent to which parent. There will have to be a manual process to expunge the links and that inherently means its not anonymous.   The link you provide doesn't mention anon voting and the fact is says you can send reminders to those that haven't voted means it tracks the parents.  I have used a self hosted Lime Survey to do this but it also fel down at the anonymous requirement so it was agreed with the Clerk to the governors that once the deadline had passed the result count would be exported and the original survey set up would be deleted to remove the token/parent association. 

[TechMonkey]

Take a look at Limesurvey.  A proper survey system, free if you can host it internally.  It has the ability to send out tokens that will mark if a user has filled out the survey but does not link the answer to the token.

[Stephen_UK]

With Limesurvey, is it possible to view which parents have voted (without the answer obviously) so it can be verified that the parent hasn't potentially voted by paper too?

[NegativeKillDeath]

2 minutes ago, Stephen_UK said:

With Limesurvey, is it possible to view which parents have voted (without the answer obviously) so it can be verified that the parent hasn't potentially voted by paper too?

Yes,  I went back and looked at LimeSurvey after Techmonkeys response. I was using an older version and they have improved their anonymous functions so it should meet the bill. 

[Stephen_UK]

4 minutes ago, NegativeKillDeath said:

Yes,  I went back and looked at LimeSurvey after Techmonkeys response. I was using an older version and they have improved their anonymous functions so it should meet the bill. 

Thanks. Presumably we would just need an export of all parent/guardian details to load into the survey database to send out the survey links?

[NegativeKillDeath]

15 minutes ago, Stephen_UK said:

Thanks. Presumably we would just need an export of all parent/guardian details to load into the survey database to send out the survey links?

Yes, we used to import First name, last name and email. The software generates a token table with all the unique tokens, it also has a section to customize the emails.  In the version I used we relied on the internal phpmailer to send the emails via our smtp server but it was a little flakey and didn't like doing more than 100 in 1 batch. 

[dhicks]

1 hour ago, TechMonkey said:

Take a look at Limesurvey.  A proper survey system, free if you can host it internally.

 

Thankyou for the link - looks like they have a Community Edition, and they have a core "AuthWebserver" authentication plugin that looks like it should enable it to run behind Pangolin for authentication.

[Stephen_UK]

I am going to give the self hosted version a go and see if I can get it working

[Stephen_UK]

Just to update, I ended up deploying the Community version of LimeSurvey. Apart from a few glitches with SMTP settings, it went pretty well and now over 2000 invitations have been sent out for the ballot. Thank you for the recommendations - it has been invaluable (and got me a system largely functional within 24 hours!)