SPS Voting Web App Presentation

Seattle Public SchoolsVoting Website

By Alex Hof, Ryan Miller, and Max Zinkus

Our website was developed for students and student governments in theSeattle Public Schools district. It allows student governments to post surveysand elections which can then be viewed and voted on by students from theirschools; district-wide polls can also be created. Polls can be posted at any

time, allowing the governments easy access to students' opinions andfeedback. Currently, we are finishing up a trial election at Garfield High School;because it has been successful, we plan to extend service to the other schools

in the district. The site's primary purposes are to eliminate waste and voterfraud and to increase the ease with which student opinions may be

considered.

About the Website

Student body elections at Garfield High School and other schoolsin the district are carried out using paper ballots, which requires

the printing, distribution, and manual counting of large numbers ofballots. In addition, it provides no barrier to voter fraud, as

students may simply fill out multiple ballots and turn them in.

Problem Statement

How can we eliminate the wasted resources and effort entailed by the

current polling methodology in a way that safeguards against voter fraud?

Question

• Using a website for voting reduces paper use and the expenditure ofeffort required to conduct a poll

• Seattle Public Schools' existing student login database already hasaccounts for all of the students being polled and tracks informationwhich is important for the creation of targeted polls, such as schooland grade level

• Implementing user authentication eliminates the possibility of fraudby letting us check whether a user has already voted

Key Insights

Our team, BDRTF, has developed a website to help studentgovernments poll students quickly, easily, and without fraud

through use of our district's student login database.

Elevator Pitch

Name: Brian K.Role: Student PresidentCharacteristics:

• Is an active member of his school's student government•Is very busy with the duties of his office•Likes to do things as efficiently as possible

Goals:• Wants to avoid the effort of printing and distributing

ballots•Wants to get an accurate vote count•Wants to avoid counting votes by hand

User Personas

Name: Norm SmithRole: Student OfficerCharacteristics:

• Is in charge of student activities• Likes to know what students think of planned events• Is concerned about the environment

Goals:• Wants to be able to gauge students' opinions accurately• Does not want to expend his budget on running polls to get

this information• Wants to save paper

Name: Sally B. FotinRole: StudentCharacteristics:

• Cares about student government, but is not very involved• Is very interested in her classes' subject matter• Does not have much free time out of school and is

constantly on the goGoals:

• Wants to be able to vote and share her opinion withoutmuch hassle

• Wants the disruption to class time caused by elections tobe minimized

• Wants to be able to vote from her smartphone

When they visit the website, users are shown a login page. Herethey can enter either a school-supplied username and passwordor, if they are part of a student government, the special sign-inwhich we have assigned to their school. Students may vote onpolls and view results of polls; school accounts can create and

edit polls and change polls which have already been voted upon toresults.

App Flow

App Flow continued If a user logs in as a student, he or she will be shown a

list of currently open polls on which he or she has notvoted; the student can click on each of these to go to thepoll in question and cast votes, after which he or she will

be returned to the list of polls. If no more polls areavailable and their are published results available, the polllist will have a link to a list of results, where students can

see the votes cast in past surveys and elections. Inaddition, the list of polls, the list of results, and an About

page with information concerning the website are allaccessible from any page via a dropdown menu in the

upper-left corner.

App Flow continuedWhen a student government member logs in, he or she will be

presented with a page that links to lists of polls, questionswithin polls, and results relevant to his or her school. In the

polls list, the user may create a poll, perform a variety ofactions on multiple polls at once for ease of use, or visit the

editing pages of individual polls for more in-depthmodification options. Each poll has a link to a list of the

questions found within it, and users are prompted with a linkto write questions for each poll upon its creation. Results havea separate list page with the same format as the list of polls.

A dropdown on the upper-right corner of every page giveslinks to different locations within the administrator interface,allowing for easy navigation. In addition, administrators havethe dropwdown for and may view all of the pages available tousers, allowing them to get an idea of what there voters are

seeing.

User FeedbackWe have worked closely with our local student government

throughout the design process, and their feedback playedan integral role in the choices we made during

development. Features such as the differentiation betweenpolls and elections, the ability to embed links in polls'

descriptions, and the list of available polls seen by studentswere all built to their specifications. In addition, we have

performed both within-class and whole-school trials,allowing students to test the site and report any issues withits functionality or flow, although there have been none so

far.

Poll Index

Example Poll

Administrator Interface

The website was built using the open-source tools Django, SQLite,Twitter Bootstrap, and JSON. It is hosted on the Linode web service

and its SSL certificate is issued by GoDaddy.com.

One of the most significant feasibility challenges was authenticatingstudents. For our access to Seattle Public Schools' login database, we

have to thank the cooperation and tireless efforts of April Mardock,Seattle Public Schools' Network Systems/Telecom Manager, CarmenRahm, Seattle Public Schools' Chief Information Officer, Ted Howard,

our principal, and Earl Bergquist, our Computer Science teacher.

Technical Details and Feasibility

Recent Election Results