Requirements:
  • PHP 4.2 or higher
  • MySQL 4
  • GD image library
  • Tested on Apache 2

VCSVote offers organizations an easy, secure way to conduct elections and surveys. It aims to provide a simple, hassle-free interface for voters and focuses on standards compliance. By eliminating complicated inessential options, VCSVote empowers the voters rather than working against them. VCSVote is built in object-oriented PHP and features a modular authentication system.

 
an intuitive voting system for organizations, small and large

More About VCSVote

The main goal of VCSVote is to set up a multiadmin/multielection voting system for use at Vanderbilt University. The fully-featured system will be easy to maintain and extend for the future needs of VandyCS.

Student voting distinguishes three types of users:

  • End Users - People who are allowed to vote in elections
  • Admins - People who can add new elections and administrate elections only for their specific organization
  • Super Admins - Users who can modify all elections and manage organizations

The application is written in PHP4 using a MySQL database backend. The display elements are rendered using the Smarty templating engine. (included) It also uses the GD library of PHP to do image processing.

Where To Get It

Development snapshots are available after each commit, but you may also check out the newest version from Subversion. In order to check out a copy you will need a subversion client. For windows we suggest TortoiseSVN. Follow the "Checking Out a Working Copy" section of the TortoiseSVN documentation using "http://svn.vandycs.org:448/repos/vcsvote/trunk" as the repository url.

You can also download these snapshots which are updated after each commit:

Who Should Use It

VCSVote is ideal for organizations that need to manage elections for many sub-organizations. It provides secure authentication-based elections that target subsets of the population based on user attributes (dorm, year, login, etc). VCSVote allows subgroups to conduct elections and allow only the people in that subgroup to vote. The system is currently customized for Vanderbilt elections, but we are in the process of abstracting authentication and user information such that it could be used anywhere.

VCSVote was designed to be flexible by separating logic from presentation. Conducting surveys with the VCSVote system is easy with a few simple modifications to the Smarty templates.

Support/Documentation

The VCSVote user documentation is still under development. However, these resources might be useful for developers: