That post is over a year old. What ever happened with that voting project?
I participated in that Bitcoin election and it was a miserable failure, with two different types of technologies explored. In the end the election was completed, but going in the Foundation had serious deficiencies just in handling the data alone (not to mention that the swarm thing was not workable). As a matter of fact, the plug was pulled on Swarm mid election and there was a switchover to Helios. Neither worked very well, however.
At the end of January 2015 ~ Bitcoin Foundation sent e-mails to a large number of persons who renewed with the Foundation, claiming that their membership is expired.
Staff member confirmed that “in order to re-engage with expired members, we send this e-mail to a master list of approximately 300 records inside our CRM... Your record was not manually updated in this DB so it pulled it.”
Prior to the election, 300 members therefore, were (and possibly still are) being misinterpreted by the Foundation's system and even when the members can see that they are paid up at
https://members.bitcoinfoundation.org/ (which is no longer accessible) ~ the Foundation was interpreting members as expired who in fact were paid. Subject to correction through manual updating, it is unknown how many members were kept from voting due to this internal error, but it is safe to conclude the following:
1) A report on what happened with these errors was never issued prior to the 2015 election.
2) An unknown, but potentially significant number of errors remains, which would likely either dissuade eligible voters from having voted, or would convince Foundation staff (who had not yet corrected an error) that a certain member is not eligible even if the opposite is true.
Additionally, neither Swarm nor Helios worked to the Foundation members' satisfaction and there were numerous complaints about both.
Finally, the single (trusted!) individual who was granted the (central!) authority to run the elections refused to provide a 'NOTA,' Withhold, or Do Not Approve option in the second round of voting (Helios), even though such an option (Withhold, Do Not Approve) was present in the first round. This was voter disenfranchisement. Section 4.8 of the Foundation Bylaws state: "Voting: Each member is entitled to one vote on each matter submitted to a vote of the members of the member's membership class. Voting may be by voice vote, written vote (emphasis added) or through electronic means as directed by the Executive Director. Cumulative voting for the election of directors or otherwise shall not be authorized." Various members attempted to submit a "NOTA" (None of the Above), or alternatively Do Not Approve vote in the second round by written vote sent in via e-mail as is allowed in the Bylaws. However, the individual granted the authority to run the elections refused to count the votes and the Board refused to answer the complaints about this matter.
In sum, I would submit that Swarm and Helios were not workable (at least, when used as election tools), obviously, Swarm went away somewhere (who knows what they did with all that money they got), and I don't know about Helios. And of course, as noted, such models are subject to abuses from central "authority" figures and corruption in general.
In light of what we are seeing in the horror of North American politics lately (as just one example), I venture to suggest that "now is the time" for everyone to admit that the system of representation we have is a failure, and it's time to move on to something completely different.
