---
title: Choose Your Candidate
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2022/program/proposals/917
beginning: '2022-11-04T15:45:00.000-07:00'
end: '2022-11-04T16:15:00.000-07:00'
resources:
  internet_archive_identifier: SeaGL2022-Josh_Berkus-Choose_Your_Candidate
presenters:
- name: Josh Berkus
  affiliation: Red Hat Project Atomic
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/358
  gravatar_id: e49b70b058716dd9dea73a14a1d9856e
  biography: Josh Berkus works on Kubernetes at Red Hat's Open Source Practice Office.
    He also chairs the Cloud Native Computing Foundations' Governance Working Group. He
    lives in Portland with a librarian, an opinionated cat, and way too many books
    and pottery.
---

Big, popular open source projects have as many elections as Seattle does. Instead of mailboxes, though, they use online voting platforms. Most of this voting software implements what are called "preference elections" in order to choose the most liked candidate. This started with the venerable CIVS, and now includes several software projects like Helios and Elekto.

We'll cover what preference elections are, how they work, and why you want them for your project elections. Then we'll briefly explore the open source options available for voting software.

Whether you're already part of a project using voting software and want to know more, looking for a voting platform for your project, or just interested in online ballot systems, you'll learn a lot about options and implementations.
