Wikipedia:Election clerk

Election clerk is a user group that allows the user the ability to create, edit, and tally polls on the English Wikipedia using SecurePoll. On other Wikimedia Foundation wikis, the role of an election clerk is often referred to as an "election admin". Election clerks are responsible for setting up and managing the polls used for administrator elections.

Guidelines for granting

Any admin can assign themselves (or any other admin) to the election clerk user group. It is not allowed to be given out to non-admins.

User rights

Only election clerks can manage polls, via Special:SecurePoll.

Election clerks are able to perform the following tasks:

• Create a poll.
• Access the SecurePoll logs for any poll.

Election clerks assigned to a specific poll are able to perform the following actions on that poll only:

• Add and edit the questions and options in the poll before it begins.
• Add or remove other election clerks or CheckUsers to the poll.
• Strike or unstrike votes, and see the strike history of individual votes.
• Generate tallies for the election. If the poll is encrypted, this requires a valid encryption key.
• Set the voter eligibility criteria, including uploading lists of eligible and ineligible voters.

The associated user rights are securepoll-create-poll and securepoll-edit-poll.

Procedures

Encrypted polls

When creating an encrypted poll, the poll creator must generate a private/public key pair and configure the poll with the public key. The private key must be kept securely so it can be used to trigger a tally of the results once the vote has ended. For redundancy, there should be at least one other election clerk who is not a scrutineer with access to the private key.

What polls can be created

There is community consensus to run local polls for administrator elections. Test polls should also be OK. Any other polls should be discussed with the community and a consensus reached in favour of secret voting, since secret polls sometimes run counter to English Wikipedia's core values of consensus and transparency.

Global elections

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) occasionally creates global polls for things such as movement charter ratification, universal code of conduct ratification, U4C member elections, and WMF board elections. These are hosted on vote.wikimedia.org (votewiki), and a redirect poll is created on English Wikipedia that, when clicked, redirects the user to votewiki. WMF Trust & Safety creates these polls. This is unrelated to English Wikipedia election clerks.

See also

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 214 § Enabling SecurePoll elections with the electionadmin right – Village Pump discussion for the introduction of role
• Wikipedia:Administrator elections/SecurePoll permissions proposal – proposal that outlines the technical aspects of introducing the election clerk user group.