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A word about the elections

Submitted by Aldo Hoeben on Fri, 2007-02-09 11:52.

As our current members know, we're currently running an election for the Board of Directors of our association (only members have access to that page). The elections are hosted on this site, which I built. I am not only a current member of the current BoD, I have also put myself forward as a candidate for the 2007 BoD (again, members only). Some may see a conflict there.

There has been extensive discussion on the BoD mailinglist on the fairness of the election system. In the end, the current board and all members who put themselves forward as candidates agreed on using the website based election system*, with the following constraint:

For the duration of the election, I have no access to the admin account**. I have handed over control of the admin account to our treasurer, who is not a member of the board, and who is not up for election, and she locked me out of the account.

The whole site is built on open source software. The specific code used for the elections can be found on the Drupal project page.

*: The following alternatives were considered:

  • Use of a the 3rd party voting solution.
    Cons:

    • we would have to share our members' email addresses with a 3rd party
    • we would have no insight in the voting system, other than their 'good reputation', whereas our own system is open source
    • we require our constituency to go somewhere else to vote, creating another barrier
    • it costs money
  • Retract my candidate statement.

**: My own account on the site is no more powerful than that of other members of the IVRPA webteam. When I want to do something 'special' with the site, something I can not do as a 'mere webteam member', I log out of my own account and log in as a special user. This user account is the 'admin account' for the site, and that account has full access to every single bit of functionality that is available. Only the admin account can give a user more rights than he has, only the admin can install new functionality, and only the admin account has full control over the election.