Electobot

The ultimate electoral arbiter.

Supports:

• One vote per person
• Proxy votes!
• Multiple votes per event

This vote was intended for Incognito events that require voting. Feel free to do whatever you want with it.

Usage

Running locally

To set up the service locally, install requirements in your favourive virtual environment pip install -r requirements.txt. Then, you need to make a mail_credentials file in your current working directory with contents as follows, line by line:

Mail server (e.g. mail.msvincognito.nl)
port number (e.g. 465)
username (e.g. electobot)
password (e.g. hunter2)
sender email (e.g. electobot@msvincognito.nl)

With that done, now you can use the ./electobot-cli.py script to manage the votes. Before you can launch the server itself, run these commands. They will set up the database and give you a register link you can send out to people:

# Create the sqlite database with tables
./electobot-cli.py setup
# Create an event. Running the line below returns a reigster link, which you can send
# out to people to sign up once you start the server itself
./electobot-cli.py create event "General Assembly"

Now that there is an event, you can launch the server for testing locally as

python -m flask run

Now the flask server is running (presumably at localhost:5000), so you can check it out there. To open a vote, do the following:

./electobot-cli.py create poll "Is the new president elected?"
./electobot-cli.py create poll_option "Yes"
./electobot-cli.py create poll_option "No"
./electobot-cli.py open

Once people are done voting, you can do

./electobot-cli.py tally

By default commands refer to the most recent event/poll, but you can change that by using the --event or --poll_id argument. You can see a list of all polls/events in the database by running

./electobot-cli.py print_table polls

or

./electobot-cli.py print_table events

the output is a bit messy, because it's literally the entire SQL table. Sorry about that.

To get a list of events with register links for them, do

./electobot-cli.py list events

You can also delete events as follows:

python electobot-cli.py delete event <event_id>

Running on a server

When running this on a server, you should be sure to use SSL. This way people's email addresses won't fly through the cyberspace in plaintext. To do that, we provided a docker setup which runs an nginx server that accepts SSL encrypted requests and forwards them to the electobot backend. Before you can use this, you need to get some certificates. We recommend letsencrypt. Look into certbot for how to obtain them.

Once you have these certificates, you need to have Docker and docker-compose installed. Then go to the docker-infrastructure directory and modify the .env config file with parameters of choice. Then, run docker-compose up -d. This will build the electobot Docker image and launch the app. There is a ./electobot-cli.py helper script in the docker-infrastructure directory which talks to the ./electobot-cli.py script on the Docker container for managing the service. Make sure you have a mail_credentials file in the root directory of the repo, like described in the Running locally section.

Good luck.