[liberationtech] EveryVote Prototype / Advice for Knight Foundation Prototype Grant Applicant?

Fri Jan 31 00:29:38 PST 2014

Hello people:

Glad to read some other people working in libre software voting systems.
As I have commented other times in here, I work in an open-source voting
system too [0] [1] [2]. I'd like to bring your attention to two key points:

 * There are few grants to apply for a voting system as far as I have
seen. We tried to do a FP7 european project (working with ~7 other
european entities like universities, companies, NGO, etc), which took a
lot of work and it's very difficult to get - and as we were novices, we
didn't get it. We also applied to some Knight Foundation funds but we
also didn't get it.

The focus is usually in either opendata/transparency or the developing
world, so an electronic voting system is usually not really a best-fit
and because there's a lot of competition, you don't get the grant.

I believe it's important to raise awareness about this because
developing a secure open-source electronic voting system requires a lot
of effort and I think it has a lot of benefits for society. And you
don't really want to end up privatizing e-democracy, or using democratic
tools without any or good enough security measures.

BTW, I'm not thinking just about elections, we need to develop
democratic tools for the whole community decision-making thing:
filtering options, discussion, collaborative proposal ellaboration. We
have tons of ideas about that in AgoraVoting [3] [4], we just don't have
the resources.

 * If you want to have do many kinds of tallies, you should check the
openstv library [5]. It's written in python, unittested with real
election data, and it supports a lot of voting systems: approval, Borda,
Condorcet, IRV, and all kinds of STV methods.

 * A lot of successful open-source tools privatize their source code.
For example, openstv closed their source code in 2011 and now we have to
host in out github account [5] a copy of that and support it ourselves.
That also happened to us with verificatum [6], a provably secure mix-net
we use inside our software to make secure (as defined in the academic
world) elections, and now we have to maintain it at our own risk.

This last bullet point is probably related to the difficulty of
accessing to grant money and how difficult and time-consuming this kind
of projects are: when after years of hardwork you finally get noticed,
you say to yourself: I did it, I'll benefit from it.

In the case of verificatum, I know a bit the author (Douglas,
world-class cryptographer), after years of work alone on a provable
election library library unique on its class, and now the monopoly
multinational Scytl [7] may use and benefit from all his work for free.
Tough decision.

Don't worry, we won't ever do that with Agora ;-)

Regards,
--
[0] https://agoravoting.com
[1] https://github.com/agoraciudadana/agora-ciudadana
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/agora-ciudadana-devel
[3]
https://blog.agoravoting.com/index.php/2013/07/07/open-proposal-elaboration/
[4] https://blog.agoravoting.com/index.php/2013/12/15/liquid-filtering/
[5] https://github.com/agoraciudadana/openstv
[6] https://github.com/agoraciudadana/verificatum
[7] Scytl is such a monopoly in elections that they even state in their
website that they do 87% of online-elections world-wide
http://www.scytl.com/products/election-day/scytl-online-voting/

On 31/01/14 04:44, Chris Csikszentmihalyi wrote:
> Mitch,
> 
> Echoing Peter, there's a lot of ink spilled about various preferential
> voting systems, including rank, multi-stage, etc.  Benjamin Mako Hill, who
> may well be on this list and many of you probably know, did a project in my
> research group at MIT to develop both a preferential voting library and an
> example app called selectricity (currently unmaintained).
> http://rubyvote.rubyforge.org/
> https://gitorious.org/selectricity
> 
> What was great about Selectricity was that one could choose from about half
> a dozen election methods, including plurality, Condorcet, Schultze, etc.,
> but also see what the election would have resulted in if another method had
> been used.  Selectricity was used by a variety of unions, student groups,
> etc. to do board votes, etc.  One election for the board of Students for
> Free Culture was a great example, in that the Schultze method (also used by
> Debian) was chosen, and resulted in a completely different set of board
> members being elected than plurality had been used.
> 
> The shorthand we used to describe its difference from plurality:  10 people
> want to go to lunch.  Half really prefer Szechuan food, and hate Northern
> Italian cuisine.  Half crave Italian the most but hate Szechuan.  But all
> of them would choose Thai food for their second choice, and really like it
> a lot.  In plurality voting, _no one would ever eat Thai_.
> 
> Anyway, feel free to look at the code bases -- I think riseup used rubyvote
> in one of their projects? -- and note: it was developed in part with Knight
> Foundation funding!
> 
> Chris.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Peter Lindener <lindener.peter at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> Hi
>>     Mitch-
>>
>>     I went to your sight's URL and git hub repository....
>>
>>    I did not dive into your web sight's code....  But I'm wondering if
>> there is any consideration by way of the algebraic dependencys of Von
>> Neumann and Morgenstern expected utility theorem,<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem> it can be proven that a well formed Cardinal Ranked Choice voting system
>> is nessisary for all voter's to be consistently represented over the full
>> space of potential Social Decsion outcomes.
>>
>>    Does your web sight utilize this kind of Ranked Choice voter
>> prioritized preference ballot?....   If not, how might your system in any
>> real sense take into account every voters secondary preferences if they
>> happen not to win there first?
>>
>>    There is more to the Social Decision Systems problem, but lets start
>> with the basics....   without a Social Choice Function's having access to
>> the entire Cardianl ranked choice preference priorities of each and every
>> voter, it would be impossible for a voting function to consistently
>> represent each voter by attempting to maximize the expected personal
>> utility of each and every voter over the probability space of all possible
>> outcomes...
>>
>>    What does it mean when you use the phrase "EveryVote" ?
>>
>>     -Peter
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 5:39 PM, Mitch Downey <mitch at everyvote.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi liberationtech,
>>>
>>> I'm applying for the Knight Prototype Fund, and I'm new to this stuff. Is
>>> there anyone here with grant experience who can offer some advice? The
>>> application is due tomorrow, January 31 before midnight. Even if you send
>>> advice for the project after the deadline, we'd appreciate the input.
>>>
>>> We're requesting funding to finish building the MVP of the open source
>>> (AGPLv3) EveryVote election and townhall meeting platform. Click the link
>>> below to check out how EveryVote could help increase voter turnout, connect
>>> constituents to representatives and candidates, and facilitate debate
>>> online.
>>>
>>> EveryVote Prototype: everyvote.org/prototype
>>>
>>> Our intended audience for the Spring 2014 MVP is university student
>>> organization elections, such as Student Governments, Campus Activities
>>> Boards, Fraternity Councils, Homecoming King and Queen, and any other
>>> organization with elections. EveryVote group pages have to be easy enough
>>> that the Election Commissioners of the student organizations can
>>> comfortably manage the pages themselves.
>>>
>>> Also, EveryVote is dedicated to using international open government data
>>> standards, and building its software with federation to maximize the
>>> freedom and convenience of users, and also so EveryVote itself cannot form
>>> a monopoly over access to public data or public data tools. We'd also like
>>> to help educate university students about the value and challenges of open
>>> data standards and network federation.
>>>
>>> Please let us know if you have any questions, and thank you for your
>>> consideration.
>>>
>>> Mitch Downey
>>> contactus {at} everyvote [dot] org
>>>
>>> --
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>>
>>
>> --
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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