Voting Procedure

Election period (2025)

• Week 1 - 11/2 to 11/8 - candidate submission
• Week 2 - 11/9 to 11/15 - meet the candidates
• Week 3 - 11/16 (12:00 AM) to 11/22 (10:00 PM) - voting period
• Results: Monday, November 24

Eligibility

People who have been members for the past 6 months are eligible. Day Pass holders are not eligible.

Procedure

1. Email election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com saying that you want to vote

2. The commissioner emails a security code to your email address as listed in the Artisans Asylum records

3. Reply to the commissioner's email with your vote (Normally your security code will automatically be part of your reply - if not for some reason, the commissioner will follow up with you.) You are allowed to write in candidates and to rank as many people as you want.

If for whatever reason you can't use your email address on file, write to election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com and explain the situation. We'll figure something out.

Example

From: pace.willisson@gmail.com
To: election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com
I would like to vote.
-Pace

From: election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com
To: pace.willisson@gmail.com
Your security code is 0slVDfpg
Please reply to this message with your vote.
-Election Commissioner

From: pace.willisson@gmail.com
To: election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com
For Board of Directors, my vote is:
1 Rosalind Franklin
2 Neil Armstrong
3 Ada Lovelace
4 Leonhard Euler
For Member Liason to the Board of Directors, my vote is
1 Alan Turing
-Pace
Quoted message:
>>From: election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com
>>To: pace.willisson@gmail.com
>>Your security code is 0slVDfpg
>>Please reply to this message with your vote.
>>-Election Commissioner

How votes are counted

Votes are confidential and only seen by the Election Commissioner.

Each candidate has a bin and the first step is to deal out the ballots according to their #1 choice. The candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the ballots in that bin are redistributed according to their #2 choice. The process repeats using successive choices until there number of remaining candidates equals the number of open seats.

We are guided by Cambridge municipal elections which started using Ranked Choice voting in 1939. The details of the procedure are at https://www.cambridgema.gov/departments/electioncommission/cambridgemunicipalelections

Seems a little complicated - why the security codes?

The reason for security codes is that it's not that hard to spoof a "from" email address, so if we just accepted votes based on coming from a registered email address, there could be some false votes. It's much harder for a bad guy to intercept someone's email. So, members start by asking for a security code and the Election Commissioner is careful only to send the codes to email addresses on file. That means we can trust that a vote message that contains a valid security code couldn't have been generated by someone forging From addresses.

It is a pretty careful procedure that might be a little more elaborate than we need for our community. But we're a makerspace always experimenting with ideas, and what we learn about efficiently self governing we might be able to teach to other communities where there might be more risk of people trying to subvert elections.

Questions?

Ask the commissioner: election-commissioner@artisansasylum.com