React frontend stack with a full serverless AWS backend stack. This voting system was built during the Fall 2020 ExComm elections. Because voting in person is a major health hazard due to the pandemic occurring at the time, an online voting system was necessary in order to facilitate a free and fair democratic election in an online setting. This repo represents an attempt to facilitate that election. If you see any bugs, feel free to create a new GitHub issue!
The future goal of this repo is to be merged into Members Only in case PR Comm wants to transition from a pure paper ballot system to a pure electronic system after the pandemic. Usage of this repo past the Fall 2020 ExComm elections is up to the discretion of future ExComm.
The frontend stack was first written by
The backend stack was written by lambdas
directory is stored on a Lambda function on AWS. The Lambda function invocation is through AWS API Gateway and the
internal database is AWS' NoSQL database DynamoDB.
There are two different databases in play: the CalbandUsers
database which contains all registered voters within Cal Band and the Votes database which contains every single vote.
The CalbandUsers database has a primary index of email and columns dm, execSec, prd, pwHash, and stud.
The email and pwHash columns refer to a registered voter's email and password hash respectively as strings whereas
all other columns are boolean values that indicate whether or not a registered voter has already voted for that
position. If the voter has already voted for said position, then no new vote is registered. A registered voter may only
vote for a position once and all votes casted after are discarded.
The Votes database has a primary index of voteType and a sort index of id with column for voteRaw The voteType
of a vote is the position that the vote is for (dm, execSec, prd or stud). The id is there to just distinguish
between unique votes. The voteRaw column contains the JSON dictionary ranked voting choice of a voter in string form.
The id column is create by hashing together a registered voter's email, pwHash, and current
UTC datetime to the nearest millisecond of invocation (based off of Amazon's servers) and then hashed again. The hashing
algorithm is a modified SHA-256 in which only the first 36 bytes are used. This gives 16^36 possible combinations and
the probability of collisions is extremely small. Going backwards from vote id to voter is functionally impossible
due to the intractability of going from hash to input and because finding the exact millisecond of UTC datetime is
impossible to retrieve.
tl;dr: It is practically impossible to connect a vote to a voter.
Send a POST request to https://soqgbubrta.execute-api.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/vote/ with the a body payload
specified below to register a vote!
{
"voterId": "Remy Ratatouille",
"pwHash": "canjkasejcjkanjeafn",
"voteType": "dm"|"execSec"|"prd"|"stud",
"vote": {
"Oski Bear": "1",
"Josie Bruin": "2",
"stanfurd tree": "A",
...
}
}The vote parameter can contain as many candidates that you want. Note that there can be any number of abstain votes
which are marked by the "A" but all ranked votes must count from 1 to N. If any number is skipped or put twice,
the vote will be discarded.
Send a GET request to https://soqgbubrta.execute-api.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/vote/ with the a query string
parameter voteType with the value dm, execSec, prd, stud, or test in order to tabulate the vote for the position
specified by voteType.
Last updated: 12/8/2020
© calband, brv, jamz, fun, and DEMOCRACY #democracy 😤