GOSH 2023 Community Council Election: Independent Observer Thread

Community Governance Elections
5

Hello GOSH Community,

I am following up on this thread to share that the 2023 GOSH Community Council Election results have been announced! You can see the results here. I also invite our independent observer, Freda (@Yamorti_1) to raise any questions or concerns she has regarding the election, or to confirm that the election has been carried out fairly.

I do want to share more information regarding the voting platform (Star.vote) and some of the issues we had with it during this year’s election. Luckily, the developers from Star.vote were very quick to respond, and we resolved all of these issues and carried out a fair election. Freda was also cc’d on emails while we worked to fix these issues so that she was in the loop regarding what was going on.

We realized that we were using an older version of Star.vote, which meant that it was more prone to bugs. In the future, the Star.vote team has offered to consult us prior to our election to ensure the best version of Star.vote is being used.

The two issues we faced this election were the following:

  1. The Star. vote platform crashed for a few days during the beginning of the voting period.
  2. One glitch on the platform caused one person’s vote to be recorded incorrectly.

We resolved these issues by doing the following:

  1. When I was notified of the platform being down, I emailed the Star.vote team right away, and they were able to get the webpage back up in a timely manner.
  2. The Star.vote team showed me how to access each ballot, where I was able to manually fix this person’s ballot so that the correct votes were there. I then used STAR Vote 2.0 to count the votes, which allowed me to include the correct data from this person’s ballot.

Considerations for next time:

  • Although we were able to get the voting platform back up and running, we weren’t able to change/extend the deadline for voting. In future elections, we will work with the Star.vote team to see if it’s possible to change the deadline once the election is live.
  • The Star.vote advised we avoid elections that require 9 or more winners, as this overworks the system. If in future elections we have ~10 or more candidates, we will consult the Star.vote team to determine the best approach to counting the votes without overwhelming the system.

That’s all for now, thanks everyone for your participation in this year’s election!

Bri

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