vote

vote optimizes the election

Digital voting system for Abakus' general assembly, built using the MEAN-stack (mongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js). Relevant (Norwegian) blog post: http://webkom.abakus.no/vote/

Setup

vote assumes you have a MongoDB-server running on mongodb://localhost:27017/vote and a redis-server running as localhost:6379. To change the URL, export MONGO_URL and REDIS_URL as an environment variable.

$ git clone git@github.com:webkom/vote.git
$ cd vote

# Start MongoDB and Redis, both required for development and production
$ docker-compose up -d

# Install all dependencies
$ yarn

# Create a user via the CLI. You are promted to select usertype.
$ ./bin/users create-user <username> <cardKey>

Usage

vote uses a RFID-reader to register and activate/deactivate users. This is done to make sure that only people that are at the location can vote. The RFID-reader needs to be connected to the computer that is logged in to the moderator panel.

An example deployment can be found in the ./deployment folder.

Development

$ yarn start

Environment variables

• MONGO_URL
  • Url to the database connection
  • default: mongodb://localhost:27017/vote
• REDIS_URL
  • Hostname of the redis server
  • default: localhost
• LOGO_SRC (optional)
  • Url to the main logo on all pages
  • default: /static/images/Abakule.jpg
• COOKIE_SECRET
  • IMPORTANT to change this to a secret value in production!!
  • default: in dev: localsecret, otherwise empty

See app.js for the rest

Production

$ yarn build
$ LOGO_SRC=https://my-domain.tld/logo.png NODE_ENV=production yarn start

Using the card-readers

Make sure you have enabled Experimental Web Platform features and are using Google Chrome. Experimental features can be enabled by navigating to: chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features. Please check that the USB card reader is connected. When prompted for permissions, please select the card reader (CP210x).

Serial permissions (Linux)

When using the card readers on a linux based system google-chrome there can be permission problems. Chrome needs access to the ports, and often the ports are controlled by another group, so chrome cannot use them. Therefore you must do one of the following:

1. Run google-chrome as root

$ sudo google-chrome

OR

2. Add your user to the dialout group.
   • Check what group the tty(USBPORT) is:

   $ ls -al /dev/ttyUSB* | cut -d ' ' -f 2`
   

   • Check what groups your user is added to:

   $ groups

   • Normally the tty is in the dialout group, so add your user to that group with:

   $ sudo usrmod -a -G dialout $USER

You need to sign in and out to get the new privileges!

Tests

vote uses mocha for the backend tests and cucumber.js/protractor for the frontend tests. To run them all you can do:

$ yarn test
# To run in headless mode:
$ HEADLESS=true yarn test

Vote occasion

We have a list of every occasion vote has been used. If you or your organization use vote for your event we would love if you made a PR where you append your event to the list.

The list is located at ./usage.yml. Just create a new entry at the bottom. Then run yarn lint to see if your YAML is correct.

---

MIT © webkom, Abakus Linjeforening