as a voter, i would prefer not having to wait at every election for an email to find and start voting

[KiaraGrouwstra]

presently, there seem to be four pieces of info relevant to voters to participate in an election:

• user (can be shared across elections)
• password (as above, where applicable)
• election URL (there doesn't seem to be a general login where you can find a list of elections you are eligible to participate in)
• election credential (specific to both election and voter, distributed for each election by email or manually)

one challenge we face is the emails occasionally take a bit longer to arrive for some of our users, delaying our voting process during general assemblies.
we would try to account for this by sending the emails in time, then occasionally find the question wording might still change a bit, making this not a great solution.

to address this, we would prefer to ensure we can send voters credentials they can share across elections, as well as a single place to log in where they can find new elections they are eligible to vote in.

is this use-case something that has been considered?

[glondu]

There are two design decisions that conflict with your wishes:

• credentials are unique to an election
• the server doesn't know who the voter is before their ballot is encrypted

It should be easy to share credentials across elections... Actually, with a bit of effort, an external credential authority can already do it. I don't know if we want to make that easier, though. 🤔

Concerning the second item, the initial point was that the server shouldn't be able to serve wrong data to a targeted user. However, the idea of authenticating before in order to get the list of elections one is eligible to participate in sounds like an interesting feature. 🤔

To answer your initial question: no, this use-case has not been considered. I will need more thinking to decide whether we want to support it better or not.