Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Most large institutions require using paper ballots for participatory budgeting. We need a smart way to account for them.
Best is to account for them in a seperate way, probably via the admin interface or using a csv import.
This proposal has been rejected because:
Decidim's premise is to hybridize face-to-face and digital participation to ensure that it is as inclusive as possible. However, the use of paper combined with the digital layer presents a number of security and process integrity issues. Our recommendation is that in-person voting be done with digital supports.
This proposal is not accepted in the main project, although it can be developed as a module.
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Conversation with Pierre Mesure
I agree with everything you say but at the same time, most cities using Decidim are not at all in this security problematic.
Huge cities like Paris (250K voters in 2019) still have over 50% paper voting and the import process is done without any sort of advanced verification. The voting booths are in charge of making sure that people write their name and sign on big files (same as traditional elections) but I'm almost sure the ballots are imported as CSV.
Here in Sweden, we have ballot boxes in public places and although we try to have people checking, the possibility of someone committing fraud is there and we balance it out with the benefit of lowering the threshold of participation.
Finally, no matter whether we agree on the required degree of security or not, developing a function to import paper ballots should start with an MVP and that MVP would be a simple import of the paper results through an easy interface. Security can be added later and be made optional.
Yep, it's also a possibility that the technical identification phase is omitted completely for paper ballots. Then it's obviously much easier to solve.
Here in normal elections the identification phase is separated from the ballot. You identify yourself, you are marked as "voted" and you get the ballot. With that ballot, you can do whatever you like but you only get one, that's guaranteed.
If it's done similarly, the validity check is at the voting locations and extra technical check would not be necessary in Decidim assuming there's no extra conditions on the budgets to be voted on.
For me it's not as much of a security concern. I'm mostly just concerned about the validity of the result and that sometimes we need to check the voter's eligibility based on their metadata (e.g. for district specific votings).
I do understand it's not the case everywhere, so I'm probably overthinking the whole thing.
(I looked for this proposal in the first place because this need arised in one town)
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