[svlug] svlug election stuff - next community directions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Lord Sauron (lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com):

> If you don't mind some random teenager looking at it, I know PHP 
> (assuming it's PHP - CGI just confuses me).

The traditional setup's indeed a CGI:  We've used Ian Kluft's "Vote::STV"
Perl module, most recently v. 0.4 (http://ian.kluft.com/opensource/code/) 
and implementing the "Fractional STV"[1] voting algorithm.  Licence terms
are GPLv2.  Coding style's pretty clean and straight-forward.

Since only once has SVLUG ever had a contested election, and that was a
straight-up two-party race, using preference-voting mechanisms strikes
me as massive overkill.  (Yes, Bruce, I can hear you getting restless
from my saying that, but using complicated voting methods for very
simple and almost never contested elections still seems bizarre, to me.)

Not that this tells you much, but the working copy on our server lives
at /home/httpd/cgi-bin/stv on the local filesystem, and is 696 lines
long, so I won't reproduce it here.

[1] http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/fracSTV.html
http://www.cfer.org/learn/gloss.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote