Old Tin Roof

In a move to help make the elec­tion process much more sim­ple for stu­dents affil­i­ated with the Uni­ver­sity of Cen­tral Lan­cashire Student’s Union, they approached me to help pro­duce an on-line sys­tem.  The sys­tem that they cur­rently used was pos­si­bly dis­cour­ag­ing to stu­dents vot­ing, as well as being a costly solution.

The new on-line elec­tions sys­tem allows the Union to set-up elec­tions & ref­er­en­dums when they want to, with a sim­ple 6 step process, that includes a large amount of flex­i­bil­ity over how they run them (includ­ing whether spe­cific gen­ders, or stu­dent schools can vote).

Stu­dents log­ging in to vote are shown clear, sim­ple screens to help them through the vot­ing process, and are pro­vided with extra infor­ma­tion about the can­di­dates via writ­ten man­i­festos, pho­tos and even YouTube videos.

Once an elec­tion is com­plete the sys­tem cal­cu­lates and dis­plays the results using a slightly mod­i­fied ver­sion of the Elec­toral Reform Society’s ERS97 rules for Sin­gle Trans­ferrable Vote based elec­tion.  The mod­i­fi­ca­tions were sup­plied and ver­i­fied by the NUS, and add a layer of com­plex­ity to an already com­plex vot­ing sys­tem.  Results are then print­able, or can be down­loaded in PDF format.

Respon­si­bil­i­ties

• Design; from ini­tial con­ver­sa­tions through to completion
• Front end coding
• Server side devel­op­ment & testing

Tech overview

• Built in Ruby on Rails 2.3
• Stan­dards com­pli­ant HTML & CSS
• Acces­si­ble to WCAG 1.0 AA
• Cal­cu­lates results using the ERS97 STV rule­set (plus addi­tions from the NUS)