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Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Wireless Voting For Students?
RabidRabbit23 writes "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students. We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees. There will be two or three committees with about 200 students in each. We need to be able to record yes, no or abstention votes and must be able to identify each student's vote. We looked into radio response clickers, but it is very expensive to buy 400-600 of them. They cost about $40 at university bookstores, which is way out of our budget, but we don't know what kind of discount we could get by buying directly from the manufacturer. We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for a better way to record the students' votes?"
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google around for arduino IR receiver. open source code to decode sony, philips rc5/6, nec codes. that's pretty much all of them.
then the trick is to also enable ir-send (same library) and build small arduino senders with an ir-blaster (ir led) and give each a unique code for the 2 or 3 buttons you give them.
consider IR instead of RF. very cheap and easy.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
As a former MUN-er myself, I know that no matter what you try, someone is going to slow it down by either not paying attention or for some inexplicable reason not having access to the voting mechanism. Having a web app would be ideal, since these students (should) all have laptops, but not only did you rule that out, there's always one or two students who don't have a computer. I would just instruct the committee chairs to disallow roll-call votes except on major issues. Voting by raised hands is about as fast as you're going to get under these restrictions, and it's fair to all students.
A Model UN Club meeting is in progress at Springfield elementary.
SKINNER
Ok, delegates, you leave tomorrow for the statewide Model U.N., so this is out last chance to bone up. And bone we will!
All of the kids break into laughter, except Lisa.
BART
(to Lisa) Lighten up, Lis.
SKINNER
(to Martin) Finland, let's see that naitve dance.
Martin starts dancing Lappish style.
SKINNER
Smile more. Work that pelvis. No, too much smile. Sit down. (to Milhouse) Poland! Tell us about your nation's achievements!
MILHOUSE
Well, uh, I heard they sent a rocket to the sun once... at night... And there was that submarine, with the screen doors...
SKINNER
No, no, no, no, no, young man, you need to do some SERIOUS boning!
This time only Lisa laughs.
BART
Oh, grow up, Lis.
SKINNER
(to Bart) OK, Libya... exports!
BART
Yes, sir, you American pig!
SKINNER
(chuckles) Nice touch.
BART
Uh, ahem, let's see...
Bart shuffles his blank papers, pretending to find something.
BART
The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn, or as the Indians call it, "maize". Another famous Indian was "Crazy Horse". In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast. Thank you.
A commotion interrupts Skinner before he can comment on Bart's performance. Nelson, the Japanese delegate, pinches Wendell's nose with chopsticks.
WENDELL
Oww, I can't breath! Please stop him!
SKINNER
I'd like to, but I'm afraid he has diplomatic immunity.
LISA
Point of order, if we want to learn anything we must respec--
BART
Point of odor, Lisa stinks.
All the kids laugh.
SHERRI
(to Bart) Hey. Leave her alone!
NELSON
(to Sherri) You leave her alone!
All the kids start fighting with each other, with one exception. Ralph, the Canadian delegate, stands.
RALPH
(singing) Oh, Canada!
Skinner bangs his shoe on the table.
SKINNER
Order, order! Do you kids wanna be like the real U.N., or do you just wanna squabble and waste time?
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Make the students buy their votes. Soon after you should have enough money to by the clicker thingies.
You want cheap and you want to be able to identify each vote with a specific person?
Certainly doing something with computers is going to be expensive in some way. It is also going to take a long time because not everyone would have their own computer.
I'd suggest colored pieces of paper that are preprinted with a number. Red for no, green for yes, blue for abstention. Something simple like that. The pieces of paper could also be tagged for "Question 1", "Question 2", etc. Counting them wouldn't be that hard and they would be traceable - names could be written on the slips but even without that you would have the preprinted numbers. This would fall apart for blind students but would work for multiple languages.
Sure, you could have some fancy system but it is going to cost money. Potentially lots of money. Anything that would require queuing up would likely get unmanageable quickly with 200 students.
I guess by "wireless" he means "paperless" too.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
The problem with doing this with wireless is the same problem we had with a wireless Point-of-System: when asked to vote, several hundred people will press the button simultaneously. That results in a shit storm of collisions for IR and for most wireless networks.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They could just use paper ballots like everyone else... You can count 200 ballots in a matter of minutes instead of training students on an electronic system that may or may not be flaky.
You can set up an ODK form (http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/), kids vote with their smartphone (or computer), and all the results go into a Google Fusion Table (http://www.google.com/fusiontables).
#1, #2, and #3 seem to answer the request nicely, but #4 doesn't meet the "must be able to identify each student's vote" requirement.
It depends entirely on how many polls you need to perform in what time span. The way we do it (non-profit NGO) is by a simple web form - there's a number of terminals available for people who doesn't bring their own laptop/phone, and those who do bring their own, can use it. Performing a poll with 100 people takes ~2 minutes - but it'd depend on the number of people with their own equipment and the number of terminals at hand, naturally.
Avoid doing it by hand, if at all possible. Counting sucks and people are way, way more focused if they can get the outcome almost right away rather than after n minutes.
Why use any commercial solution at all? You're in a school after all. Make your students create simple buttons on your electrics class. You can just transfer the clicks via wire. Then make your programming class code the back-end system for a computer. Microsoft offers Visual Studio Express to students for free and you can easily get a cheap license to your school by calling Microsoft's sales team. At the same time your students will get real world experience and get to know the best programming tools used in the industry.
Come on, you're a Microsoft sales rep., aren't you?
#4) break out that portable C02 laser you've got and BAM! landslide victory! ...and no more meter.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
SMS, my boss just came back from a technology conference and was talking about how during lectures some speakers had people vote from mobile devices by sending texts.
Did you not even make it past the first sentence? "I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students" means they don't work for a high school, not that most any high schools would have an "electrics" class anyways, or that your suggestion made any sense at all.
The counting portion of the problem is by far the easiest.
Buy a large number of signs (laminated paper, plastic signs, small flags, paddles; may be single color or double faced, or similar). Have the vote taken by holding up the sign.Then have people count the votes in groups and report to a central person OR Take a picture with a digital camera. Load the picture into analysis software (I used to use a photoshop filter that counted the number of distinct dots in a color range in fluorescent microscopy, cant recall the name) and then you will have a definitive count.
There's a free setup you can use that does just that: SMS Poll
If you have a good enough camera, you might be able to have each student hold up a paper with the QR-code of their member-ID + vote (so each person gets 3 pieces of paper: one for yes, no, and abstention, make sure the paper are labeled textually with the vote and member ID/field for the member to write down his name), and get someone to take a picture making sure all QR-codes are captured perfectly. But since the chances of the camera seeing all QR codes will probably be low, you need to distribute the task to several cameras. So e.g. you'd have 10 designated tables which you can call the voting station. 20 people each will lay the QR codes of their answers on the table, and one guy takes a picture. Make sure you also have a piece of paper with a QR code to identify which question is being voted on, as well as a textual description of the question. If the questions are to be determined later, than just a QR code of "Question no. 17". During the voting rounds, make sure that number (17) and the question associated with it is displayed on the overhead projector, so that the voters know what they are voting on.
OK, the next part would be collecting all the pictures from the cameras (human problem), and analyzing the pictures to verify that all members' votes have been recorded properly (software problem). I'd say use a good quality camera phone with WiFi (protect the network with a password) and software to upload (mail?) the pictures to a server.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Then make your programming class code the back-end system for a computer.
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
need wireless solution...
use wires.
you're an idiot.
The original question didn't specify that the solution had to be wireless. They were looking into wireless solutions but frankly it seems unlikely they'll be able to do wireless and meet their main requirements:
"We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees."
If wireless isn't a strict requirement, a wired solution would be much easier to implement affordably.
Bow-ties are cool.
You're not doing anything electronic for 200 people for $200, unless you make one and pass it around, which will take hours.
2. If it doesn't have to be so fancy, what's wrong with just having them raise their hands and counting them?
Or, if you want a permanent identifiable record, take a photograph as people have their hands raised during each phase (yes, no, abstain). Use more than one camera from different angles to make sure you don't have occlusion problems. Have volunteers count hands live (each volunteer covering one Nth of the committee) to get real-time values that are approximate and sufficient for votes with more than, say 10 points difference; for close votes, use the photographic record.
While the cell phone idea sounds good, and likely everyone will own one, the likelihood that (a) everyone will have brought theirs, (b) they won't be busy doing something else with it, (c) they remembered to charge it so the battery doesn't die before the vote, (d) they send their SMS to the correct number, (e) they don't blow the encoding, no matter how simple, (f) their provider accounts are in good standing / topped up, (g) the local cell tower can handle the traffic from so many devices simultaneously, and (h) the SMS actually get delivered in a timely fashion, etc., is not 100%.
Here's another idea: You want something dead simple and fast. Print lists of the delegates with three checkboxes (yes, no, abstain) and have 10 volunteers go and poll each delegate in person, ticking the appropriate box. Each volunteer tallies his section and the chairman adds up the reports for the final vote. Each vote will take perhaps 5 minutes or so. The key with this approach is that you need LOTS of vote recording volunteers.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Same idea, different pricing plan:
Poll Everywhere
Polls for up to 30 votes are free, after that you've gotta pay.
For about $65 you can get an SMS voting site; vote via SMS, Web, twitter... can limit to one vote per person and record (by phone #) who votes. Requires attendees to have SMS services... and for the 3 or 4 votes might cost some of them $1 or so for the SMS message. Easy, cheap, real-time reporting on web page or flash control.
We used : http://www.polleverywhere.com/ but there are lots of competitors with similar service.
Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Wireless Voting For Students?
read much?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Not to be a Luddite, but what's so wrong with voting on paper or via visual ballot (raising placards)? Yes wireless is sexy, but it's always going to be glitchy or expensive (especially if you factor in the cost of the time to set it up).
-- Adam McCormick
Turning Point is maybe your best choice. They may have been the one with the $40 clicker option, but they also have alternatives like iPhone/Blackberry/Android/laptop apps so students can respond that way. Bingo, no need for expensive clickers and you get the individual vote tally.
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Use 'SMS Enabler' program to receive SMS messages on a PC. It can write received messages to a text/CSV file in real-time or dispatch them to a web server.
smsenabler.com
Paper ballots have worked just fine years - why are they not suitable here?
Ask Slashdot: Setting Up Wireless Voting For Students?
read much?
You've got high expectations. Are you new here?
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
i'm sure the support staff at voxeo.com/prophecy would be more than happy to provide a telephony solution for this; they live for this kind of thing. i would imagine you could even run it over a free developer account. worth checking out at least! they also run IMified.com which could make it people only need to text.
Electronic voting could be worthwhile for the cool factor, but offers little improvement over well established methods. The standard is a hierarchy that trades time against obviousness of the result.
1). Voice vote, good if result is very disproportionate. Instant
2) Raised hands (usually combined with voice) instant, or at least quick, to 60-40 or so.
3) a "division of the house" for those very close votes, or if someone really wants a record of who voted how.
The division, if needed, can be accomplished by people physically moving. It turns out to rarely be needed.
The system is at least 300 years old, but it still works. See Roberts Rules of Order.
I like the texting idea. On the same note, would all the students have laptops? If so, maybe you could just have them email their votes to specific questions to a specified address. Then you could use a python script or something to sort out what response came from who for which question.
Which would make sense if SMS was a free (as in beer) service for everyone, and everyone owned a device capable of sending SMS and carried it all the time.
Point it at the assembled body, have them stand to vote "Yes" and write some software to recognize where each seat is located, whether there is a person in that location and whether that person is standing.
Put a 90-degree-angle half-periscope above each table. To vote, shine the red, green, or abstention-colored laser pointer into the tube.
Rig the laser pointers so they are in a fixed position. Not only will this make voting easier but it will discourage abuse - with 200 kids you will have one smart-ass in the room.
Rig the tubes so the output points to a wall forming a line.
Count the dots of various colors after each vote.
Be prepared to change out broken laser pointers and those whose batteries get exhausted.
Upside: Students can construct and install the mirror system.
Downside: If you don't own the room, you may not be able to pull this off.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm the original submitter. Suggestion 1 is excellent, thanks very much. I think I'll look into http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/ for counting the SMS messages. Also, just to clarify we have about $5,000 of budget so it would be no problem to get some cell phones or another solution for people who don't have them. As to your other suggestions, we must match the person to the vote so an anonymous system like counting hands or using a lux meter may not work. I think the scantron may be almost as slow as a normal roll call. Thanks for the great suggestions though!
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We had a full model UN in high school. Since all the seating was assigned ahead of time; the vote-keeping was done entirely on pre-printed ballot sheets. basically in the format:
Sheet 1 ...
Name: Y N A
Name: Y N A
Total: [blank] [blank] [blank]
And they were based on the seating at the university's lecture hall we used, they all listed countries in order as they were seated, starting with the centre.
You pass out the sheets to the centre people, and then they pass it along to the end; they're forwarded up;
At the front: Tallied per sheet; :[blank] [blank] [blank] ... :[blank] [blank] [blank] :[blank] [blank] [blank]
the totals transferred to the log sheet
Sheet 1
Sheet X
Totals
And you had totals, with fairly rapid turn around and summations. Secret votes just had a stack of paper with "Country: ____ Y N A" and they were required to fill it out and put it into the box going around. to be condensed and summarized onto the above formattetd sheets at the front by the two lackies.
Junk character filter? Really? I wonder what the threshold is. Wow, this really makes it a bit difficult to nicely explain the formats, but then what can you really do about it. I wonder what the thresholds are.
One high-res digital camera and
A4 papers printed with a large QR code (2d barcode) - unique id and answer number printed in human readable form as well.
Just pass out as many papers as there are answer options (2 , 3 ? ) to the students.
Use a canon 5d mark III or something that can record video as well and ask them to wave the cards around for 5 seconds or something , so you get everyone (in case one card is behind someone else's head).
Okay, sorry. Let me rephrase:
:)
I'll let someone else address #1, #2, and #3, but #4 doesn't meet the "must be able to identify each student's vote" requirement. Better?
lol Hey man, at least use the same account to reply :P
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
The scantron idea could be quick if it was parallelized. The following are assuming a single scanner.
At one extreme, each student is filling out their own form, which must then be passed down the row and then scanned, presumably one at a time. Everyone votes in parallel, but you have to scan 200 forms serially.
At the other extreme, you have a single scantron which is passed around, where each student answered one "question" (always the same number to track who voted for what). You only have to scan 1 form but must wait for 200 people to vote serially.
However, if students were sitting in rows of tables, and you passed one scantron down each row, then scanned each form, you would only have to wait for say 15 votes then 14 scans, which is pretty quick.
Give each student a poker chip, and have them write their name on it. When it comes time to vote, have each student place their chip in a pile for yes, no, or abstention. Weight each pile, and you will know how many people voted for each.
As someone who's used in-class polling systems quite a bit (I'm a college professor), there are only two solutions that will work. A dedicated "clicker" system (I recommend the ones by Turning Point), or a non-technical solution. Paper ballots are obvious; the guy who suggested labeled poker chips had a good idea too.
If you try to muck around with laptops and cell phones and polling websites and custom software and/or hardware, you're going to spend your whole time doing tech support rather than model UN'ing.
Pick between low-tech or high-cost. If you try to go high-tech and low-cost, you will also get "doesn't work".
No you don't. You want. I did Model UN in High School-- at some of the larger conferences too. We survived without electronic voting. Focus on the politics. If you have money (or time to search for a free one) to throw away hire a professional diplomat to come in and give a talk. I *still* remember and occasionally talk about such speeches that I heard in High School. That will be far far more valuable to your students than an electronic voting solution that is likely to break at some point, waste a lot of time while you're trying to fix it, then force you to go with paper anyway.
Using tech here might not be the best option but if you have a lot of items to vote over then it may be your only choice. However, if you do decide to use it for anything actually important then make sure it's secure. My university has been using clickers for years and they are so insecure it's not even funny. Twice now with different models (first ir then rf) myself and a friend have reverse engineered the protocol then created our own model that spits out as many votes by as many users as we wanted. We then *ahem* presented them to the lecturers as a proof of concept.
You can change the outcome to however you want, even subtly by distributing votes across all possible options with yours just in the lead. To make it more subtle you can listen in on other peoples votes as they are being made and then override them using the same id's. Heck, I know of some schools that use them for examinations allowing you can use groupthink to cheat (not 100% accurate for obvious reasons but not exactly a bad way to go..).
Who need's speling and grammar?
I don't exactly know what "Model UN" is, but if it's supposed to be some sort of high school aged indoctrination into UN activities, why not TRULY make it model the real thing, by having the few fairly decent and affluent kids foot the bill for everything, while letting three or four of the school's biggest troublemakers and bullies head the most vital and important committees on everything and give them veto rights against everything that comes up. Then give a few people a bunch of blue helmets and nerf bats to stand around with and "monitor elections" and if any sort of trouble breaks out, they run and hide in a janitorial closet until the coast is clear.
Even more if you are looking at a small number of votes... Why don't you go buy a couple blocks of paper? It is absolutely more secure than any e-voting scheme (yes, even if it is not for a big countrywide thingy). No need to set up an e-voting solution - unless you just want to impress the kids with shiny kewl toyz.
>>They were looking into wireless solutions but frankly it seems unlikely they'll be able to do wireless and meet their main requirements:
Yes, because absolutely NO e-clicker software for cell phones exists.
>>Also, just to clarify we have about $5,000 of budget
FYI, e-clicker software for smartphones exist.
The last time I looked at it, it was something like $15 for the host, and free for the clients.
At the University of Michigan we have developed a "Mobile Participation System" that allows students to participate/interact in lectures (up to 1000 students or so). The instructor can setup multiple choice, math or word based questions, and subsequently, students respond using any of the following options:
... it's free!
1. Text-messaging (SMS)
2. An iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch App
3. Android App
4. A Laptop
Best of all
This system is about 2 semesters old at this point and will be presented this year's ASEE conference. If you'd like more information, here is a link to the document: http://braunschweig.eecs.umich.edu/~mlapp/downloads/refs/P08-ASEE-2011_MPS.pdf
For a live-demo, check out our YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HKuH3pq58E
OP here! The roll call votes are NOT anonymous, everyone gets to see/hear the results. That's the point of doing a roll call vote; so everyone knows how everyone else voted. Paper ballots would take longer than just calling out everyone's name and recording the vote. Using poker chips or anything else reusable that we would collect would also take a long time to tally up, plus all the time to hand back the chips to the owners. I'm really trying to come up with an alternate solution so that we spend less time voting and more time doing Model UN.
if I had mod points.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Although, I have to wonder, e-mail being cheaper, is there some specific reason to use SMS? is SMS that much more convenient? Or is e-mail from the phone not yet that wide-spread on non-smart phones in the US yet?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Not reasonable at a model UN convention.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
He said, and I quote "volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students which means that running wires since we are talking about a bunch that moves from place to place is right out, as is cell phone since we are talking HS kids and most schools frown on telling the kids to bring their phones.
I'm shocked nobody here has thought about going "old school" with it...light guns. The tech is old but its cheap, a couple of colored LEDs connected to a couple of buttons and a target to aim at. If you wanted to get fancy you could probably use a MSFT Kinetic as the target and have someone at rent a coder cook up some counting software, shouldn't be hard. After all you have only 3 possible answers...yes, no, abstain. Hell if you wanted to be extra cheap you could use a single LED apiece and have the LED pulse a set number for each choice. Might even be easier that way since the Kinetic will only have to count pulses.
So rent a coder, BGMicro for the parts, and a Kinetic, seems like the bottom of the barrel cheapest you can go and have it do want you want wireless without sinking in the dough. Hell we have enough coders here I'm sure someone would be nice enough to offer to whip up the code since you're helping kids and all.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I mean, in the real UN, they have pushbuttons, don't they?
Don't we want to give the students the chance to feel like they must be important because they have all these high-tech solutions to make it easier for them to sound pompous?
Feeling a litte cynical today, and I know the reasons for the pushbuttons in the real UN, but I think that we really don't want to encourage the next generation to de-personalize voting, nor do we want to risk teaching them that technological solutions for voting are valid.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You're talking about pretty high resolution, there.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Ok, i am a geek. I understand you want to be fancy. But counting 500 votes manually takes 250 seconds if one person does it, and less if several persons do it. So unless you want a "real-time" result, i would think its ok to take paper ballots. Moreover it will be a record of the voting.
On the other hand, i dont see why "the bandwidth is not enough" if you dont allow them surfing (or throttle it), then the BW should be fine, however consumer APs may have problems handling 500laptops. The problem is not to count people who cant connect as absent.
You can also have a mixed solution:
Give out a sheet of paper to everybody which contains yes/no QR codes with url for the corresponding vote (make sure to secure it with a cryptographic signature), and tell the one who cant connect to give their paper manually, so you can quickly scan it.
Typically in parliamentary systems (like Model UN), you cast votes orally ("Yea" or "Nea"), and only bother to count if it's too close to call. When you do, it's by a show of hands. This method is fast and reliable. What's wrong with it?
access points can't handle more than a few clients. you need a lot of access points for 500 users , and by that time you're getting a lot of interference too.
you can take a look at Election Buddy - it would probably do what you are asking for. http://electionbuddy.com/
I'm not sure what you mean by 'not enough bandwidth', but 200 web pages isn't that much.
I keep your daughter close as well. We should hang out.
bad trollbot bad
But remotes for garage door openers are available online for anywhere from $1 to $10. You can also buy receivers or plain logic boards for receivers for less than $50. These systems typically have 256 or more codes.
This is just an idea, but maybe you could look into whether you can interface a logic board with a computer, and report to the computer which code is being received, and OPEN or CLOSE as yes or no. An abstention would simply be no vote for that code.
It might be worth at least looking into. Even if you had to use several receivers, it still comes out a lot cheaper than $40 per person.
Get them to hold up cards with numbers on, FFS.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
any wifi connectable device can connect to an open wap sitting in the corner that has a web server on it allowing people to vote that way. Do schools use more electricity now that students have to charge their gadgets throughout the day?
Think iTouch, iPhone, other smartphones, ipads, the DS, the PSP, laptops, netbooks, tablets, certain newer model LG toasters, these things exist in the world. nerds doing a model un of that magnitude probably have these items. Someone with enough time could turn a PSP into the web server running it all.
You say you don't have enough bandwidth for WiFi, but you do! Simply set up your WiFi network to only have a single destination. There is no rule that says "all WiFi access points must have full internet access." Students without a laptop could share another student's machine since even two or three people voting on one machine wouldn't take long.
I didn't want to be labeled an Anonymous Coward so I'm replying to my original post. Also if you actually wanted to go this route I would be happy to offer my consulting free of charge in my free time while you are getting this put in place. Let me elaborate that the above could have a web application interface. They could vote by just pasting a URL in their browser. If they voted more than once it would just over write their previous vote so they could change their vote in the week but would never have duplicate votes. Google App Engine will scale and you can set a threshold of how much you want to be billed for resource from free to X dollars. Why not ask the students how they want to do this? Let them make decisions and plan how they want to do it? Isn't that what the UN is about?
if you want to speed up the counting of a non-technical solution, using something that has heft to it, like a pokerchip or marble might be the way to go. 3 containers for votes, whichever is the heaviest wins.
Doodle http://www.doodle.com/ would work. It has to sortof be on the honor system and you would have to designate times as votes. 12pm for yes and 1am for no with clicking both or not clicking both for abstentia. You can set it to secret and only count votes for a set name (tell them they have to vote with such and such a name and people can object if their name was used by someone else). Still it is ripe for abuse and not a secure system. But it is free and will tally votes so if you can work on the honor system it is great.
Have a locked metal box with a slot in the top, everyone takes a ballot from the vote register at the box, checks off their choice, and puts it in the box. At the end of voting you open the box and count the ballots. One of the hazards of working in the high tech industry is the tendency to overthink everything, to use more tech than is actually required instead of the simplest solution practical.
Or even more universal, Twitter, they can simply use a hashtag per response (or @fictionalpositive / @fictionalnay / @fictionalabstain), submit it via whatever they have, text message (SMS), web page, mobile site, app or terminals in the room for those without mobiles. Twitter search provides 50 results per page, for easy tabulation.
No need to setup anything beforehand (except test that your hashtags are unique and readily searchable).
(Heck you could even live stream the results as they come in, or delayed.)
BOOOOO!!!!! Don't teach kids to vote electronically you sod.
Yes, I read the headline. And I read beyond the headline, to the part containing the actual question.
Bow-ties are cool.
from experience Its perfectly possible for a chair to do hand votes for 200/300 delegates and you could always have tellers count if its close or use card votes and count them. The debate is the important part. maybe you need to read Citrine and/or Robbert's on how parliamentary systems work and all talk to some people with actual experience.
This is the OP. The system they use in the GA hall in New York would be perfect, actually. They basically have a push button at each table that records each county's vote and all the results are displayed. That's exactly what I want to do. This doesn't have to be something super flashy or modern, it just needs to be more or less instantaneous and able to display the results of each student's vote.
600 SMS'es on the same cell to the same recipient could cause some interesting effects, especially if multiple carriers are involved. You might see random votes get delayed for longish period of time and you might not get the result within seconds. Email is also set up to allow for delays. It might not be a real problem but dont expect a SMS system to be 110% reliable.
Wireless Ethernet fails a lot more transparent i.e. the voters will get a feedback from the system if their transaction fail, SMS/Email will fail silently i.e. it will not be obvius to the voter if transaction went through.
If I hadn't already posted.
Letting the programming class count all the votes might be just as good as letting the programming class cast all the votes.
Teaching people to vote by computer is a bad thing, IMO.
Actually, making people aware just how fragile voting is, is an awesome thing to teach people. IMO.
There's too many folk who actually trust "the system". Letting students create "the system" themselves, they're bound to discover that their system is not that trustworthy... and some of them might make the leap to realising that this also holds for commercial systems.
Excellent idea. Much better than any idea for building a system for them. Let them experience building a system, then have them figure out how to attack it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.