election software

[Luis Villa]

[ben adida, the author of helios, is a friend of free software; if you
cc him on responses about helios you're likely to get a good response.
responding both to remind people of that and to point out to ben the
questions asked by toshio, below.]

[tangentially, i did not realize the app engine dependency; i would
have been slower to recommend if i'd realized that. still, glad to
hear that there is a pgsql port in the works.]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:18 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
>> Hey, all-
>>
>> recently saw this: http://nigelj.livejournal.com/10507.html Can't
>> comment directly because I don't have an LJ account.
>>
>> Elections are fairly serious, important business- much less so in a
>> community where elected representatives are the deciders of last
>> resort instead of first resort, but still. So I'd strongly recommend
>> using someone else's code that has been tested and reviewed for
>> security and correctness rather than writing your own. Two open
>> options are:
>>
>> http://www.heliosvoting.org/
>
> For those who are interested, the source code is here:
> http://github.com/benadida/helios/tree/master
>
> It makes some bad choices as an open source project but nothing that's
> not fixable.  (Keeping local copies of third-party upstream sources
> jumps out at me immediately.  Keeping partial local copies of third
> party modules and mixing those together and with the developer's own
> code makes me shiver).
>
> This is written in python with cherrypy as its object dispatcher.  But
> it also makes use of django utility functions (django's local copy of
> python-simplejson :-(  It looks like the Google App Engine code is
> required at the moment but it's being ported to work with a plain
> postgresql backend.  I don't see signs of an ORM being used although the
> code is being ported to a home-built db abstraction layer based on the
> Google App Engine.
>
> I don't see very much information in the app's data model for limiting
> who can vote.  I ran into tracebacks creating a new election so I'm not
> sure how it works in practice.
>
> The "Java support required for heliosvoting" popup is disconcerting...
> Is that a Google App Engine requirement?

luis