Selectricity

After an eight-year run, I’m officially shutting down the hosted version of Selectricity. It’s list of bugs and issues with has grown over the years as all of its original creators have all moved onto other projects.

More importantly, the codebase itself has bitrot and is no longer safe for us to run. Selectricity is based on an early version of Rails 2 which is no longer supported with security updates upstream. Updating it was taking more time and effort than I have for it.

If somebody else wants to upgrade the software to use Rails 4 and wants to take over maintenance of the hosted version of Selectricity, I’d be happy to give our accounts on the server to do so. Contact me at makohill@uw.edu and I’ll get you set up. Until then, all I can do is apologize to the people reading this who were hoping to run an election.

To the tens of thousands of people who have used Selectricity over the last eight years and to all of those have provided support, encouragement, and funding, thank you so much for an awesome run and for helping support what really achieved its goal of providing voting machine for the masses!

In the meantime, you can try using the Condorcet Internet Voting Service hosted by Cornell. It’s not quite as nice as Selectricity or as pretty, usable or, quick. But it’s more than serviceable and its well maintained.

Of course, the Selectricity has always been free software, distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License and remains available online for anybody who wants to run it themselves or borrow from the code.

— Mako