Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Votewiki/SecurePoll are not fit for service

This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement.

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Votewiki/SecurePoll are not fit for service

Problem: Votewiki & Securepoll (V&S) are currently failing to meet several key requirements of communities demanding secure electoral capacity. Worse, yet, they are even less well suited to the impending increase in demand (such as new Arbcoms being encouraged into being by the Universal Code of Conduct) and variability in electoral methods (potentially the U4C, likely the Global Council, etc etc). Example issues include, but are not limited to: inability to handle simultaneous elections in different languages; extreme user-unfriendliness for Single Transferable Vote with more than a few candidates; lack of a tied-candidate mechanism for the STV option; difficulties in adding additional voting systems; the system is also technically fragile, with major bugs impacting elections requiring WMF staff activity to resolve.
Proposed solution: There have been discussed interim solutions (Such as creating a second vote-wiki to allow for two simultaneous elections), but they are just that, interim. A significant scoping work and re-development across the board would be needed, rendering this well beyond the Wishlist team's capacity.
Who would benefit: Every community that has non on-wiki elections, but especially every voter and every candidate
More comments: Everyone should feel free to add phab tickets below, as appropriate. I've not directly added the issue of struggling to find trusted/qualified individuals to scrutinise elections as that's not strictly a system issue.
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Nosebagbear (talk) 15:14, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Firstly, given the movement-charter adjacent nature of this proposal, just to confirm that this proposal is solely from me, without prior discussion with the MCDC and is not intended to indicate their opinion on the proposal. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:14, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Though not what I proposed, in Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Improvement of private vote systems I mentioned a possibility to replace SecurePoll with another rewritten extension.--GZWDer (talk) 07:14, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- So I think that proposal would make an excellent interim solution, especially if twinned with making the current system somewhat more stable, but ultimately it's still going to prove insufficient for needs (and thus makes a good more practicable suggestion vs the issue raising this more is, for now) Nosebagbear (talk) 10:19, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Support * Pppery * _{it has begun} 18:59, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support HouseBlaster (talk) 19:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Izno (talk) 00:16, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Aca (talk) 16:10, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 18:26, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Tgr (talk) 00:48, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Very much so. KevinL (aka L235 · t) 21:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support the wub "?!" 15:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Bluerasberry (talk) 17:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support GNUtoo (talk) 21:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support ★NealMcB★ (talk) 03:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support WikiAviator (talk) 16:06, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Darwin ^Ahoy! 01:33, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Thingofme (talk) 13:20, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support --Ciao • Bestoernesto • ✉ 19:15, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Ryse93 (talk) 12:42, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Barkeep49 (talk) 21:30, 10 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Long overdue. 4nn1l2 (talk) 13:42, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Qwerfjkl (talk) 13:47, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Worm^TT 13:51, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:19, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Jonathan5566^(talk) 14:49, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]