Swap My Vote is a platform which allows voters to find a partner to swap their vote with. Rather than voting for their preferred minority party in a constituency where a tactical vote is necessary or worthwhile, a voter can find someone who will vote for their preferred party somewhere where that vote makes sense, even under First Past The Post. In return, they will vote for their partners preferred party as a tactical vote in their own constituency.
Swap My Vote ran a successful project in both the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections at www.swapmyvote.uk.
In the interests of transparency, all of the code that we have written and used is available in this repository. We are in the process of working out how to make this project sustainable, but providing an open and welcoming community for continued developed will be important. So please have a look at the Contributing and Contact sections below if you'd like to help.
You will need Ruby installed.
-
Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/swapmyvote/swapmyvote.git -
Install the necessary gems:
bundle installIf this fails with error messages that mention
pgor PostgreSQL, then try instead:bundle install --without-productionsince the PostgreSQL database is not normally needed for local development (sqlite is used instead).
-
Set up some credentials and other config variables in a
.env.development.localfile. You can ask @aspiers for a copy of this file, or if you are using your own Facebook and Twitter apps for login then you can make it yourself$ cp .env.example .env.development.localNow edit
.env.development.localto contain the appropriate credentials. These will get automatically loaded via thedotenv-railsgem. -
Set up the database schema and populate it with constituency and poll data, as well as some test users accounts for local development.
bundle exec rake db:setup -
Run the application:
# Ensure binding to localhost even if $HOST is set, so that # the URL is accepted by the facebook development app bundle exec rails server -b localhost -
Open your browser to http://localhost:3000.
Note that in the development environment, emails are not sent but instead written
as files in the tmp/mails/ subdirectory.
Any help would be well appreciated. Please take a look at the GitHub
project. The items in
each column are roughly sorted by priority descending, so a good place
to start would be near the top of the Next Up column. In addition,
look out for issues labelled help wanted
or easy.
If an issue is already assigned, then probably someone is already
working on it or at least intending to. If it's unassigned then
probably it's up for grabs. However it's safer to ask in the issue
and/or in the Slack #general channel before starting on anything, to
avoid accidentally duplicating effort. Please use the contact details
below to request access to Slack.
Our roadmap can be seen in our list of milestones.
When submitting new issues or PRs, please remember to link them to the project and apply any relevant labels. Thanks!
You can contact us at hello@swapmyvote.uk.
TBD; see issue #33.