Web Based Voting
Elections Software for Student Government
Short History
•
Pre-2006 –
Elections processed by Schreyer Institute
•
March 2006 –
Transitioned to Student Affairs
– Responsibilities moved to Student Affairs.
– Met with Schreyer Institute technical staff
– Analyzed requirements based on prior elections at Penn
State, USG Elections code and other online election sites.
–
Most critical requirements – processing occurs inside
psu.edu and students administer the election.
– Determined that our in-house survey software would not
meet requirements
– Evaluated vendor solutions (hosted), not enough time to work with Shibboleth, most vendors did not have the expertise to deploy it.
– Decision to develop in-house
•
August 2006 – First of several meetings with transition chair for first
student government election. Our solution was well received.
Implementation of Project Plan
•
Workload divided between software
development team (3)
– 230 hours of analysis, design, development and testing
– Developed and prototyped to UPUA transition team
– Trained the Elections commission staff
•
One Network Administrator
– 8 hours of web server installation (elections.psu.edu)
•
Capital purchase of two new servers
– Installed servers in two locations
– Provides for redundancy and continuity
– The scalability requirement was stress tested at 1000
votes/minute using OpenSTA
Software Features
•
Some features worth mentioning:
– Login with Penn State Access Account ID
– Ballots have the choice to utilize Robson rotation
– Ballots can be created to allow one vote or multiple
votes per voter
– Ballots have the option for write-in votes
– Always one vote per student
•
Election and Voting can be restricted
based on:
– Date and Time (start and end)
– Campus
– Status (undergraduate, graduate,
etc.)
–
Other ISIS
information (for students)
•
Single ballots can also be restricted
based on:
– College
– Residence (on or off campus)
– Other ISIS information (for students)
Election Day
•
Opened at 6:00 AM
as defined in the software
•
Locked at 10:00
PM as defined in the software
•
Results were
verified for accuracy at 10:45 PM and released.
•
Zero duplicate
voters.
•
One
minor data issue – Affected 20 voters. Discovered and resolved at 7:30am.
All 20 voters were given chance to vote for missing ballot position.
•
Authentication
was converted from WebAccess to Friends of Penn State
at 4:15pm when WebAccess service was still degraded
after 1hr.
Demonstrations
For more information, contact:
Student Affairs Information Technology
814.865-7210