Apologies if this is how the system currently works.
I'm posting this on behalf of the Fedora Board. We would like for our election voting tool to work like this:
FAS2 user goes to vote, they authenticate. The voting system assigns the user a unique ID number. The user then votes, and confirms their vote. The "ballot" is stored but is tied only to this unique ID number (not to the FAS2 user/account). The FAS2 system records that the FAS2 user has voted, but does not store a correlation between the FAS2 account and the unique ID number attached to the ballot.
Thus, we have a dataset showing the results, but it is anonymized automatically, and we still know who has (and has not) voted, just not who (or what) they voted for.
Thanks in advance.
Just so we're clear. The idea is to ensure that the results of a ballot cannot in any way be tied to a user. We would also not want this data in logs on the elections app servers correct?
This might make fraud more likely but then I'm not entirely sure how its any better or worse from that perspective with what we have now.
G, can you think of any technical hurdles in implementing this?
Spot/Board: Do you want us to anonymize the data that's already in the database?
Yes, that is the idea. We would not want a correlation between a ballot and a user anywhere, not even logs. If we're careful with ensuring that once a ballot is submitted, the FAS2 user is marked as having voted in an election, I don't think we open the door to any additional fraud possibilities.
As to anonymizing the existing data, I'm not sure it is worth the effort.
If we are going to be making changes to address the voting system... are we gonna make any effort to contact someone doing active research into electronic voting methods to get an idea as to existing workable implementation concepts that accomplish the desired anonymizing of the voting but also protect against fraud?
-jef
The purpose of the elections component on the Fedora-Infrastructure trac was as to create a place for users that had trouble actually voting (keeping development and production seperate). I've recreated this ticket in the elections trac.
https://fedorahosted.org/elections/ticket/21
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