User:NeddySeagoon/Election Officials HOWTO

Overview
The elections project manages the two regular elections in Gentoo every year, for council and trustees and occasional developer wide votes. This page describes what election officials do and how they do it. The 'what' is described first and the HOWTO follows in chronological order.

Throughout the election, officials answer any questions the electorate may have on the conduct of the election.

Nomination Period
A the start of the election, the officials create the web page to track potential candidates, their acceptance status and links to the candidates manifestos.

Throughout the Nomination Period officials maintain the page with properly submitted information. What that means is spelt out in the election calling notice. Its usually mails to a a public mailing list.

Officials may issue nomination reminders via the email lists and/or IRC /topic.

Voting Period
Officials may issue voting reminders via the email lists and/or IRC /topic.

Some elections permit votes to be submitted by gpg signed email. Election officials validate the signatures (but not the ballot) as these votes arrive.

The Count
The -infra contact harvests correctly submitted votes from developers home directories, merges any validated email votes and deposits the output of this process in the election officials home directories on Woodpecker.

The election officials confirm that they all have the same set of files, evaluate the vote and confirm that they all have the same result.

Announcing Results
Once the election officials have agreed the above, one of their number announces the result on the mailing lists..

Assembling The Officials
Three election officials and an infra contact are required.

In practice the election officials must be developers as a part of their role requires an account on Woodpecker.

The infra contact will perform all of activitiecs that require root access, such as preparing the election for voting and harvesting completed ballots to make them available to the election officials at the end of voting.

The infra contact may also determine the election turnout from time to time as voting progresses.

The elections Alias
Election officials, who need not be elections project members should add themselves to the elections email alias for the duration of the election. Candidates and the electorate will email the alias with queries about proceedings.

The Wiki Page
Create the nominations page for the new election by copying a prior election and updating the election specific material.

Add a link to the new nominations page from Project:Elections/Council or Project:Elections/Trustees as appropriate.

Note to self : Tidy up Elections Project Page when this material is added

Announce The Election
Updating last years announce email works. The announcements go to different mailing lists.

Council Elections
Mail gentoo-project and gentoo-dev-announce

The Nomination Period
Follow the mailing list, per election instructions, for nominations, acceptances and manifestos and update the wiki page. Any nominations, acceptances or manifestos announced in any other way must be ignored until they appear on the correct mailing list with a timestamp in the declared window.

Election officials may advise mailing list posters that their post is not compliant with the election rules and will not be counted. They are under no obligation to do so. Election officials may not even be monitoring incorrect lists.

At the end of the nomination period ensure that the wiki page is complete and correct. The election infra contact will use it to create the ballot.

Voting
Answer questions from voters and candidates. Most questions to date have been related to the eligibility of voters.

Election officials are not disqualified from voting because they are election officials, however, election candidates are barred from officiating in the election where they are candidates.

Email Ballots (Trustees Only)
All election officials
 * Verify that the ballot is correctly signed.
 * Verify that the ballot is signed with the gpg key on record.
 * Do not verify that any ballot is a correct ballot.

Voters submitting spoilt ballots correctly signed is acceptable.

Confirm to the infra contact that the ballot is to be included in the count.

Counting
Log into Woodpecker and run countify --rank  sha1sum results-/*

Using the individual emails for the election officials, confirm that everyone has identical results.

Announcing
Announce the results by posting the Final ranked list: from the bottom of the output of countify --rank 

For Council Elections post to gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org, gentoo-dev-announce@lists.gentoo.org, elections@gentoo.org set the replyto header to gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org which is the correct list for non technical Gentoo discussion.

For Foundation Elections post to gentoo-foundation-announce@lists.gentoo.org, gentoo-project , gentoo-nfp@lists.gentoo.org, elections@gentoo.org set the replyto header to gentoo-nfp@lists.gentoo.org which is the correct list for discussion of Gentoo Foundation related business.

Note: The two -announce lists are moderated.