This glossary gives one stable meaning for each term used on this site. Many of these words are used loosely in everyday speech. Here they are kept apart on purpose: an opinion is not a ballot, a ranking is not a budget, and signing in is not the same as being allowed to vote.
Where a definition rests on a published standard, the standard is cited. Where a term is defined by this framework, the entry says so. A standard cited here is used for its definition only; it is not an approval of this project.
Defined terms
Opinion
A person’s stated view on a specific, worded question or proposal, for example support or opposition and how strongly. In this framework an opinion is private by default, may be published only by the person’s specific choice, can be revised, and is never treated as a vote. An opinion attached to a proposal becomes stale when the official wording changes. See Opinions.
Ballot
The official instrument, paper or electronic, on which an eligible voter records choices in an election run by a legally responsible authority. A full official ballot can include candidate contests and measures. A ballot is secret and cannot be made public through this framework. These websites do not issue ballots; the demo shows a simulated sample ballot. See Private voting.
Priority
A judgment of relative importance: which subjects deserve attention first. A shared priority says nothing about which policy a person prefers within that subject. Two people who both rank housing first may want opposite housing policies. See Priorities.
Ranking
An ordering of items from most to least important. A ranking is ordinal: it shows order, not distance. Ranking housing first and transport second does not say how much more important housing is. See Measurement.
Resource allocation
A division of a fixed amount, such as 100 tokens or a budget, across items. Unlike a ranking, an allocation expresses relative size. In the demo, allocation applies to a defined fictional pool of new funding and is kept separate from priority. Zero is an explicit choice, not missing data. See Tradeoffs.
Effectiveness assessment
A judgment of whether a program or policy achieves its stated goal, based on evidence. Effectiveness is independent of priority: a subject can matter greatly while a specific program in it works poorly. See Tradeoffs.
Proposal
A specific plan for public action, with an author, a responsible authority, a cost, and a status. An issue is a problem; a proposal is one answer to it. See Proposals.
Ballot item
A proposal or contest that has formally qualified to appear on an official ballot under the law of a jurisdiction. Most proposals never become ballot items. See Proposals.
Identity
The set of attributes that describe a particular person. In digital systems, a claimed identity must be established through identity proofing before it can be relied on. See Identity and registration.
Authentication
NIST defines authentication as “the process by which a claimant proves possession and control of one or more authenticators bound to a subscriber account”.1 Authentication shows that the person signing in controls an account. It does not show who they are in law or whether they may vote. See Identity and registration.
Identity proofing
NIST defines identity proofing as the processes used to collect, validate, and verify information about a subject to establish assurance in the subject’s claimed identity.2 Proofing ties an account to a real person to a stated level of confidence.3 See Identity and registration.
Eligibility
Whether a person meets the legal requirements to vote in a particular election, such as age, citizenship, residence, and district. Eligibility is set by law and decided by the responsible authority. Neither authentication nor a biometric establishes it. See Identity and registration.
Registration
The official process by which an eligible person is entered on the voter roll of a jurisdiction. Registration is run by election authorities, not by this framework or its websites. Creating an account on the demo is not registration. See Access and exclusion.
Secrecy
Also: ballot secrecy. The requirement that no one, including the operator, can link a voter to their ballot choices, and that the voter cannot prove those choices to someone else. Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires that genuine periodic elections “be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors”.4 See Secret ballot.
Coercion
Pressure on a person to vote, express, or withhold a view in a particular way, through threat, reward, or supervision. Vote buying is one form. Coercion can come from employers, households, or communities, and it is a social problem that technology alone does not remove. See Intimidation.
Verification
Checking that something is what it claims to be. In elections the word covers several distinct checks: a voter confirming their ballot records their choice, and independent parties confirming that ballots were counted as cast. Each kind must be named, because they protect against different failures. See Audits and verification.
Audit
An independent examination of records to test whether a process produced a correct result. An election audit compares reported results with durable records such as paper ballots. See Audits and verification.
Risk-limiting audit
Lindeman and Stark describe a risk-limiting audit as “a method to ensure that at the end of the canvass, the hardware, software, and procedures used to tally votes found the real winners.” It does not guarantee the outcome is right, but it has a large chance of correcting a wrong outcome, by manually examining portions of voter-verifiable, generally paper, records.5 See Audits and verification.
Published release
A scheduled, approved package of aggregate information, with its methods, denominator, consent basis, version, and corrections, made public at a fixed time. Releases are the only distribution route in this framework; there is no live query service into participant data. See Published releases.
Consent
A person’s agreement to a specific use of their information. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, Article 4(11), defines consent as “any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes” given by a statement or clear affirmative action.6 This framework adopts that standard as a design floor, everywhere, without claiming the regulation applies in every jurisdiction. See Consent.
Aggregate
A summary of many people’s answers, such as a count, share, or ranking, that does not show any individual’s answer. Small groups can still reveal individuals, so aggregates need minimum group sizes and a documented privacy review before release. See Measurement.
Synthetic data
Artificial records generated to resemble real data or a defined scenario. NIST describes synthetic data generation as “a process in which seed data are used to create artificial data that have some of the statistical characteristics of the seed data”.7 The demo uses synthetic data that is labeled “Simulated data” and never presented as real participation. See Status.
Jurisdiction
A government unit with legal authority over a defined area and subject, such as a nation, state, county, city, school district, or special district. People live inside several jurisdictions at once, each with its own powers and calendar. See Jurisdictions.
Participation
Taking part in a civic process, such as answering, attending, proposing, or voting. Participants are those who took part; they are not the same as the whole public. See Participation over time.
Representation
Acting on behalf of others. The term covers several distinct ideas, including who is chosen, whom they resemble, and whether they respond to the people they serve. Hanna Pitkin’s book is a conceptual analysis of what the word means.8 See Representation.
Passkey
The FIDO Alliance defines a passkey as “an authentication credential based on FIDO standards,” using public key cryptography; a user approves sign-in with the same method that unlocks their device, such as a biometric or PIN.9 NIST calls credentials whose keys can be copied across a person’s devices syncable authenticators.1 A passkey authenticates an account; it does not prove eligibility. See Hardware.
Agenda-setting
The process by which some issues, and not others, come to occupy public and official attention. The term comes from media research on how news coverage shapes which issues people consider important, and it also describes the power to decide which questions reach a decision. A priorities list is itself an agenda, so the framework discloses who chose it.
Apportionment
The division of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states after each census, using a formula called the method of equal proportions. Apportionment decides how many seats each state gets; it is separate from redistricting, which draws district lines within a state.
Approval voting
A voting method in which each voter may mark every candidate or option they find acceptable, and the option with the most approvals wins. It records which options a voter accepts but not their order or strength of preference.
Ballot measure
A question that appears on an official ballot, usually asking voters to approve or reject a proposal. Measures reach the ballot through citizen initiatives, popular referendums, or legislative referrals, and their official wording shapes the vote.
Chain of custody
The documented record of every transfer of ballots, equipment, or data from one person or place to the next, using controls such as seals, logs, and witness signatures. Audits depend on it, because checking records proves little if no one can show they were kept intact.
Citizens’ assembly
A body of residents selected by lot to resemble the population, which hears evidence, deliberates, and makes recommendations on a public question. It is usually advisory, so its influence depends on what the responsible authority does with its recommendations.
Deliberation
The weighing of reasons, evidence, and other people’s views before reaching a judgment. Deliberative democracy contrasts it with simply counting preferences; this framework is mainly an aggregation tool and does not describe its results as deliberative.
Deliberative poll
A method in which a random sample is surveyed, given balanced information and moderated discussion with access to experts, and surveyed again, to estimate what the public might think after deliberating. Deliberative Polling, capitalized, is a trademark of James S. Fishkin.
Differential privacy
A mathematical framework that limits how much any one person’s data can change a published result, usually by adding calibrated random noise. It gives a measurable guarantee against re-identification at a cost in accuracy that falls hardest on small groups.
End-to-end verifiable voting
A voting approach that uses cryptography so each voter can check that their ballot was recorded and included, and anyone can check the tally, without revealing how anyone voted. U.S. standards recognize it as one route to software independence, alongside voter-verified paper.
Gerrymandering
The drawing of electoral district lines to advantage a party, group, or incumbent. In 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal courts cannot decide partisan gerrymandering claims, leaving remedies to states and Congress.
Initiative
A process that lets citizens propose a law or constitutional amendment and, with enough valid signatures, place it before voters or the legislature. It is one of the routes by which a proposal can become a ballot measure.
k-anonymity
A privacy rule for released data requiring that each person’s record be indistinguishable from at least k minus 1 others on attributes that could identify them. It blocks simple linkage with outside data such as voter lists, but known attacks can still defeat it.
Nonresponse bias
The error that arises when people who do not answer a survey differ, on the thing being measured, from those who do. A low response rate raises the risk of this bias but does not by itself prove it.
Opt-in sample
A group of respondents who chose to take part, rather than people selected at random from a defined population. Results from an opt-in sample describe participants and can mislead when presented as the views of a whole population.
Participatory budgeting
A process in which residents propose and vote on how to spend part of a public budget. It began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 and usually covers a defined pool of funds rather than a whole budget.
Ranked-choice voting
A voting method in which voters rank candidates and ballots are counted in rounds, eliminating the last-place candidate until one has a majority of continuing ballots. It is also called instant-runoff voting.
Recall
A process that lets voters remove and replace an elected official before the official’s term ends, usually after a petition. Some states require specific grounds for a recall; others treat it as a purely political judgment.
Referendum
A vote in which the electorate decides or advises on a specific question rather than choosing a representative. Referendums may be required by a constitution, referred by a legislature, or triggered by citizens to approve or repeal a law.
Salience
How prominent an issue is in a person’s mind or in public attention at a given time. It is often measured by asking people to name the most important problem, a measure critics say mixes up how important an issue is with how badly it is going.
Sortition
The selection of public officials or decision-making bodies by lot rather than by election. Athenian democracy used it for many offices, and modern citizens’ assemblies use stratified lotteries so that members resemble the population.
Special district
An independent local government created to provide one or a few specific services, such as water, fire protection, or transit, within a defined area. Special districts are the most numerous type of U.S. local government and are often hard for residents to see.
Threat model
A structured account of a system, the ways it could be attacked or fail, who might attack it, and what it assumes is trustworthy. A claim that a system is secure only means something relative to a stated threat model.
Voter-verified paper record
A paper record of a voter’s choices that the voter can review before casting the ballot. It lets audits detect software errors, provided voters actually check it and the paper is kept intact.
Weighting
The adjustment of how much each survey respondent counts so that a sample matches known characteristics of a population. Weighting can reduce bias for the characteristics it targets, but it cannot correct differences those characteristics do not capture.
Evidence
The authentication and identity terms rest on NIST SP 800-63-4, the current revision of the NIST digital identity guidelines, which supersedes SP 800-63-3.3 The secrecy definition rests on international treaty text. Other definitions are this framework’s own working definitions and are labeled as such by the absence of a citation.
Competing interpretations
Several terms are used differently elsewhere. “Verification” in some election literature means voter-side checking only; “registration” in some countries is automatic; “representation” has rival theories. This glossary fixes one meaning for use on this site and links to chapters that discuss alternatives.
Application to this framework
The framework depends on keeping these terms apart. If an opinion were treated as a ballot, or authentication as eligibility, the protections described in the trust chapters would fail. Every chapter uses these definitions.
Unresolved questions
- Should “participation” count reading and learning, or only recorded actions?
- What minimum group size should an aggregate require before release? This needs a documented privacy design.
Sources
- NIST, SP 800-63-4 and SP 800-63B-4, Digital Identity Guidelines; glossary entry “authentication.” csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/authentication ; pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html
- NIST, glossary entry “identity proofing,” citing SP 800-63-4. csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/identity_proofing
- NIST, SP 800-63A-4, Identity Proofing and Enrollment; SP 800-63-4. pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63a.html ; pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63.html
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 25 (UN General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI), 1966). ohchr.org/sites/default/files/ccpr.pdf
- Mark Lindeman and Philip B. Stark, “A Gentle Introduction to Risk-limiting Audits,” IEEE Security and Privacy, 2012. stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/gentle12.pdf
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), Article 4(11), text as reproduced at gdpr-info.eu. gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr
- NIST, glossary entry “synthetic data generation,” citing SP 800-188. csrc.nist.gov/…
- Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, University of California Press. ucpress.edu/…
- FIDO Alliance, “Passkeys.” fidoalliance.org/passkeys