My HOA Is going to have a meeting with a vote for a board seat. We are going to do the meeting over Zoom this year. Each home is allowed one vote. I need to have a way to allow people to vote by secret ballot but make sure nobody votes twice, only homeowners submit a vote, etc. It would be easy to do this by mail in advance of the meeting but we allow nominations from the floor.
Is there any way to this online?
An organization I belong to had the same question. Our bylaws only permit in person meetings and voting, and we only had our first in person meeting since March last week. On the agenda: revise the bylaws to allow remote meetings and voting. Oh, I am the chair of the bylaws committee, so this landed squarely in my lap.
We proposed the revision(s) to permit remote meetings and remote voting. Simple voice votes or roll call votes can be conducted via phone or video (some of our older members are flip- or landline phone only). The issue was secret ballot. We opted for a surveymonkey survey, built on the fly and administered by the secretary, showing the results live via screen share at the conclusion of the vote. The survey would be emailed to the members in attendance (also by the secretary).
We are struggling with the ballot voting for members without computer or smartphone access. There are only three of four, but it’s a serious problem. It may come down to a sit down with them and see if there is a family member who they can borrow a device from. Regardless, it appears that it will solve the problem with the least resistance.
Yeah, just make a surveymonkey or Google forms or whatever and paste the link to the form into the zoom call.
That’s a great idea. I did some testing using SurveyMonkey and at the free level it does everything I need. I had heard of it but have never used it to administer a survey and it didn’t occur to me for this.
Thanks for your help.
SurveyMonkey is controlled by cookies. A tech savvy voter could log into SurveyMonkey multiple times, deleting cookies between voting. Or vote with their smartphone, home computer and tablet all at once.
We only have 56 homes. We usually get 20 people actually show up at the meeting, representing 8-10 homes. If they do not attend the meeting they are required to submit a paper proxy if they want to vote. If we do receive more votes than the number of notices distributed then we’ll have to nullify the vote and use paper, without having a result at the meeting. This isn’t like a county precinct.
Are you sure? I just looked at my test and each email has a different token in the URL.
Encrypt the votes with a one time pad. For each participant you need a key per vote taken - which is the one time part, if there is more than one vote, you have a list of keys - which is why it is a pad of keys. A key is simple, just a random number will do. The administrator of the vote emails to each participant their one time pad: a list of numbers. When each participant votes they just convolve their vote with the next key form their. If it is a yea/nay vote, just add one to their key or not. Then they report their vote as a number. A multiple choice vote (ie for voting for people for a position, just order the people and they add the appropriate number to their key.)
So long as the keys are randomly chosen, and never used more than once, the system is unbreakable. It makes more work for the administrator, but not a huge amount.
Cryptography, especially cryptography implemented directly by the users, is the wrong approach here. Yes, you can make a voting system that way that’s secure, but security is not the only thing a voting system needs. At least important, and possibly more so, is that it be trusted by the people who will be bound by it, and that in turn requires that it be understood by them. Show them all the mathematical proofs you like, but if they don’t have the patience to listen to the proofs, they’re going to assume that the guy who understands it (you) can manipulate the results in ways that people who don’t understand it (them) couldn’t see, and so they won’t trust it.
Far too complicated for an HOA vote unless the HOA is populated exclusively by math nerds.
SurveyMonkey admits it.
It looks like zoom has polling
Polling for Zoom
and it also looks like the votes can be anonymous.
Anonymous polling is definitely a thing on Zoom - my lecturers have used it. But you do need a paid account, according to that link
The only problem with Zoom polling is that we can have more than one attendee per household, but each household gets only one vote. It is likely that each household will have only one Zoom session, though, so maybe this will work. We will be using a paid Zoom account for this.
Zoom paid plans (maybe the webinar addon?) allows you to control admittance too. So either only allow one connection per household, or else when voting time comes, form a breakout room and only invite one client per household into that breakout room to vote/bribe/intimidate.
Well may not be the only problem.
Under Robert’s Rules of Order, ballots (as in electing people for office) allows for write-in votes. I don’t see where that is allowed in Zoom polling. If it is please correct me.
Yes, we do allow write-ins. That has to be an option. (It is on the Survey Monkey version.)
Then just change the implementation slightly. For example, generate a list of random words, and send two (for yea/nay) or more (for multiple choice) to each member beforehand. They can then give the corresponding codeword over the public chat. It doesn’t take a mathematician to determine that their vote is secret to anyone not privy to the master list. Anyone can also do some basic verification of the results, such as comparing the number of votes with the final tally, or verifying that each vote came from the set of possible answers (the person running the election would have to generate a public list with answers in random order).
If a write-in is required, just make that a fixed option and follow up one-on-one.