Anti-Harassment Tools/SecurePoll Improvements

The Anti-Harassment Tools team worked on a project for doing targeted improvements to SecurePoll extension during January through March 2021. This project was a special request from the Wikimedia Foundation Board and the Trust & Safety team to get SecurePoll ready for the upcoming Board elections 2020. AHT team took a hiatus from IP Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation to work on this project.

As part of this improvement project, AHT is working on the following features:

Improving the ability to conduct scrutiny on an election activity

 * Added logging support for checks conducted by volunteers on voter data. SecurePoll now automatically creates a log entry every time an election admin accesses voter data for an election. It captures the timestamp of access and username of the admin. This election log is available for everyone to view.
 * Added logging support for admins added or removed from an election. Admins might sometimes be added too late in an election cycle to be able to do much effective scrutiny work. To mitigate this, we have added logging for when admins are added or removed from an election.
 * On top of this, we have added filters to the logs to allow quick search when investigating a case.
 * Only users in the election-admin group may now be added to a poll as poll admin.
 * Solved a security bug where admins could edit election settings post election-close.

Improving the poll administration experience
A complete list of all the tickets AHT worked on can be found here.
 * We converted major parts of SecurePoll to be OOUI-compliant.
 * Some election settings, such as changing election admins can now be done from the 'edit election' interface without having to access the database.
 * The Tally functionality, which required database access to get results earlier should now have speed-ups in performance. We are working on eliminating the need to access the database entirely.
 * We are adding a way to differentiate between partial and full blocks when setting voting eligibility requirements.
 * Solved several bugs relating to the election administration interface.

Implementing Single Transferable vote methodology


Single Transferable vote Single Transferable vote(or STV) is a voting methodology designed to achieve proportional representation of candidates such that substantial minority factions are able to have some representatives. One of the benefits of using STV is that it aims to reduce wastage of votes by allowing proportional transfer of votes. STV is a widely used methodology which has been adopted by several countries and organizations for holding their elections. The Board Election Committee unanimously agreed in favor of using for the upcoming Board elections. en:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droop_quota