Res Publica (the SimDem election website)

SimDemocracy is an online community where citizens can participate in a simulated democracy, passing laws to change its nature. A key part of SimDemocracy is elections: We elect members of parliament and a president, and we also vote on referendums. Res Publica (this project) is SimDemocracy's election website. It supports the following scenarios:

Registered voters can cast their ballots in elections and see past election results.
Admins can set up elections, register voters and unregister voters.

Build Instructions

Dependencies

To build Res Publica, you will need a recent version of npm (e.g., 6.14.4) and a recent version of Python 3 (e.g., 3.8.5). Make sure you also have pip3. Res Publica's server is designed to run on Linux systems but may run on other operating systems too.

Change the homepage URL (Optional)

If you intend to host Res Publica at a non-root URL, go to the front-end directory. Change the "homepage": "/" field in package.json to the URL at which you mean to host the website. For instance, if you want to host at /sdvote/ instead of at /, put "homepage": "/sdvote/".

Configure Res Publica

Navigate to the back-end directory. Create a file called config.json that contains your credentials for hosting the site. The contents of a config.json should look like the example below, with real web app credentials and bot credentials.

{
    "webapp-credentials": {
        "client_id": "client ID",
        "client_secret": "client secret",
        "redirect_uri": "https://www.your-web-page.com/reddit-auth",
        "user_agent": "simdem-voting-booth-v0.0.1"
    },
    "bot-credentials": {
        "client_id": "client ID",
        "client_secret": "client secret",
        "username": "your-bot-for-scraping-CFCs",
        "password": "password",
        "user_agent": "simdem-voting-booth-bot-v0.0.1"
    },
    "host": {
        "debug": false,
        "port": 5000
    },
    "voter-requirements": [
        {
            "operator": ">=",
            "lhs": "redditor.age",
            "rhs": 60
        },
        {
            "operator": ">=",
            "lhs": "redditor.total_karma",
            "rhs": 25
        }
    ],
    "default-permissions": {
        "authenticated": {
            "vote": ["view", "cast"],
            "usermanagement": ["view"]
        },
        "authenticated-admin": {
            "vote": ["view", "cast"],
            "election": ["create", "edit", "cancel"],
            "usermanagement": ["view", "add", "remove"]
        },
        "authenticated-developer": {
            "vote": ["view", "cast"],
            "election": ["create", "edit", "cancel", "view-suspicious-ballots"],
            "usermanagement": ["view", "add", "remove"],
            "administration": ["edit-permissions", "upgrade-server"]
        }
    },
    "login_expiry": 2592000,
    "flask-logs": false
}

With the server configured, the only thing left for us to do is to appoint an admin (that's us!). Create a directory called data and in that directory create a file called device-index.json containing the following text, where your-reddit-account is your Reddit account name. If your Reddit account is, e.g., u/spez, then the Reddit account name you should enter is just "spez".

{
    "devices": {},
    "permissions": {
        "vote": {
            "view": ["another-users-account"]
            }
    },
    "admins": [
        "your-reddit-account"
    ],
    "developers": [
        "your-reddit-account"
    ],
    "registered-voters": [
        "your-reddit-account"
    ]
}

Run the server

With the config.json in place, run the server like so:

python3 ./server-manager.py config.json

Congratulations! If all went well, you should now have your very own instance of Res Publica.