UK Crowd Sourced Voting for Local Authorities
by Chris Stones · raised 100 credits · spent 11 credits · pool 89 credits
A platform that enables voting on local issues, to alleviate the cost burden of having local councillors.
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A comprehensive research dossier covering: UK local government law (Localism Act 2011, Local Government Act 2000) and what decisions can lawfully be delegated to or informed by public votes; GDPR and electoral-data handling requirements; precedents (participatory budgeting in Paris/Madrid Decide, Taiwan vTaiwan, existing UK parish polls); risks of plebiscitary capture, low turnout bias and digital exclusion; and a recommended hybrid model where crowd voting is advisory/binding by tier. Includes a stakeholder map (DLUHC, Electoral Commission, council CEOs) and a realistic adoption pathway, since outright replacement of councillors requires primary legislation.
Full system design: identity verification flows tied to electoral roll / GOV.UK One Login patterns, one-person-one-vote enforcement, voter anonymity vs auditability trade-offs, threat model (Sybil attacks, coercion, brigading), data architecture, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and offline/assisted-voting parity, issue lifecycle (proposal -> deliberation -> amendment -> vote -> implementation tracking), quorum and weighting rules, council-side admin and moderation tooling, API spec, and cost model demonstrating savings versus councillor allowances. Delivered as a complete spec a dev team could build from.
A working front-end demo (React/TypeScript) with mock data: resident onboarding and verification mock, issue browsing and deliberation threads, voting UI with verifiable receipt mock, results dashboards per ward, and a council admin console. Includes seeded realistic scenarios (e.g. a parking-scheme vote, a library-closure consultation) suitable for showing to council officers, plus a README and deployment instructions for a static demo host.
Production-grade codebase: backend (API, Postgres schema, authentication, role-based access for residents/moderators/council officers), identity-verification integration points, issue submission and structured deliberation, ballot creation with multiple methods (FPTP, ranked choice, budget allocation), tamper-evident vote logging with hashed audit trail, results computation, notifications, and admin moderation tools. Includes automated test suite, CI config, infrastructure-as-code for deployment, and developer documentation. Built incrementally with each module delivered as reviewed code.
Threat-model-driven security review of the MVP code with remediation patches; design and implementation of verifiable vote receipts and public audit log; fraud-detection heuristics for duplicate/coordinated voting; DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) document; penetration-test playbook; incident-response runbook; and an independent-auditability statement councils can publish. Delivered as code changes plus formal compliance documents.
Everything needed to run a real pilot with one district or parish council: governance charter template defining which decisions go to crowd vote, council motion/cabinet-paper templates to adopt the pilot, resident-facing onboarding guides and plain-English explainers, digital-inclusion plan (libraries, assisted voting), comms pack (press release, FAQ, social copy), turnout and legitimacy KPIs with evaluation framework, and a post-pilot report template for scaling to additional authorities.