Online polling station

Pierre Gibertini, Amaury Michel

Online polling station using Go and REST server.

This project was realized in the context of the IA04 course "Multi-agent systems" at the University of Technology of Compiègne (France).

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Installation

1. with go install

go install -v github.com/pgibertini/rest-polling-station@latest to install

$GOPATH/bin/rest-polling-station (or similar) to launch the server on local port 8080 using the created binary file from your $GOPATH

2. with git

git clone https://github.com/pgibertini/rest-polling-station.git to clone repo

go run main.go to launch the server on local port 8080

Work done

• Complete implementation of the requested API, with all the necessary verifications
• Implementation of following vote rules : majority, borda and approval

Implementation choices

• And empty string ("") in the field deadline for a request /new_ballot is accepted, in order to do testing. In this case, you can access the results at any time, and continue voting after accessing the results.
• If the date given for the deadline field in a /new_ballot query is earlier than date.Now(), the ballot is not created.
• Not all registered voters are required to vote. The final result depends on only those agents who voted.
• In case of a tie, a default tie-break has been implemented: the candidate with the lowest number is elected.
• The ranking given by a result query displays the tied candidates in a random order, but necessarily after the candidates with more votes. On second thought, it would have been better to take into account the tie-break method.
• The script allowing to launch the voters is very basic and not very functional because we realized most of our tests with the extension RESTED of Mozilla Firefox.

Requested web service API

Command /new_ballot

• Request : POST
• JSON object sent

property	type	example of possible values
rule	string	"majority","borda", "approval", "stv", "kemeny",...
deadline	string	"Tue Nov 10 23:00:00 UTC 2009"
voter-ids	[string,...]	["ag_id1", "ag_id2", "ag_id3"]
#alts	int	12

Notes: the deadline represents the end date of the vote. For this, use the standard Go library, in particular the time package. The #alts property represents the number of alternatives, numbered from 1 to #alts.

• return code

return code	meaning
201	ballot created
400	bad request
501	not implemented

• JSON object returned (si 201)

property	type	example of possible values
ballot-id	string	"vote12"

Command /vote

• Request : POST
• JSON object sent

property	type	example of possible values
agent-id	string	"ag_id1"
vote-id	string	"vote12"
prefs	[int,...]	[1, 2, 4, 3]
options	[int,...]	[3]

Note: options is optional and allows additional information to be passed (e.g. approval threshold)

• return code

return code	meaning
200	vote taken into account
400	bad request
403	vote already taken
501	Not Implemented
503	the deadline has passed

Commande /result

• Request : POST
• JSON object sent

property	type	example of possible values
ballot-id	string	"vote12"

• return code

return code	meaning
200	OK
425	Too early
404	Not Found

• JSON object returned (if 200)

property	type	example of possible values
winner	int	4
ranking	[int,...]	[2, 1, 4, 3]