We found phpESP to be pretty useful in day-to-day administration of our hostel. We used it for everything from actual voting of council members, to public-survey for deciding mess menu to booking tickets for various hostel events.

http://phpesp.sourceforge.net http://phpesp.sourceforge.net/demo

I don't think it has anonymity by default; but if you know a bit of PHP, it shouldn't be too difficult to hack. In fact a simple SQL-trigger to overwrite the appropriate data-base column would be enough.

Regards, farazs

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Kussh Singh kussh.singh@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Dinesh,

Saw your blog entry on electoral reforms. Is there any FOSS software which will help the voting process? I think we really need such enabling tools/ category of FOSS softwares. Once it becomes easy and convenient to vote, and it is ingrained as a habit from childhood, maybe some of your concerns will be addressed and India will become a REAL democracy rather than a SHAM one it is at present.

The software would fulfill a need in myriad applications e.g. in 1 Housing societies AGMs 2 Company/stockholders Annual General Meetings 3 in panchayats 4 in classrooms 5 in companies, schools, adventure groups, theater audiences, neighbourhood meetings, in ngos etc etc --i.e. wherever collective decision making is required.

I tried searching on http://directory.fsf.org and other places but have yet to find such a software. Maybe somebody will make it someday

Almost all Swiss citizens participate in voting on important issues thru the sms/mobile route and they vote atleast once a month since it is so convenient. This is what I learned from a person who came to tell us about RTI from the CHRI -- www.humanrightsinitiative.org.

Kussh

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Kussh Singh wrote:

I tried searching on http://directory.fsf.org and other places but have yet to find such a software. Maybe somebody will make it someday

and from http://ben.adida.net/ check for Helios.

On Fri, Nov 21 2008, Kussh Singh wrote:

Saw your blog entry on electoral reforms. Is there any FOSS software which will help the voting process?

Well, Debian uses devotee to conduct project leader elections (it uses the Condorcet method). http://vote.debian.org/, and navigate to the left to see how devotee provides results (look at the 2008 project leader elections -- project leader elections have a secret ballot, and a means for the voter to verify their votes without letting everyone else know how they voted)

I haven't packaged devotee yet (it needs a rewrite, to make it more flexible for other folks (like, not have to do a gpg _and_ an LDAP check), but since it works for me, the rewrite is not very high on the list of things to do. You may browse the source at: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/srivasta/debian/devotee.git

manoj