how do we allow moderators to create a new election for an already existing organization within a constituency?

[mitchdowney]

Problem: let's say Northern Illinois University uses EveryVote for Fall 2013 elections, and they want to use it again for Spring 2014 elections. With the current setup, a user would have to create a whole new election (named "Student Government - Spring 2014"?)

How should we configure the code so the organization Student Government does not have to keep creating "Student Government - Fall 2013", "Student Government - Spring 2014", "Student Government - Fall 2014", etc.?

Ideally, when a user selects Constituency: Northern Illinois University, and Election: Student Government, ideally the user will by default be presented with the election page for the current election period (the election with upcoming voting days), and the user will have the option somewhere to view previous year's elections for the NIU Student Government.

I toyed with the idea of creating an "Organization" model class, but this seemed like a clumsier solution than may be necessary...

Any ideas? We can get away with not including previous year's elections for one semester, but some sort of fix for this needs to be implemented before the end of 2013.

[scvnc]

Old elections don't go away, they're perpetually in the system (as it was designed for it to have a start_date end_date.) There could be an option on the election screen that could automatically fill in the blanks given a previous election. No need for another model that I can see.

The other option is to change it so elections reoccur automatically that takes place the same time each year.

In my opinion this isn't a big issue. It's not like a student government has to create an election multiple times a week. It doesn't take too long to create an election with a name, select the already made offices from last time, set dates, description, go. Having a "fill in from last time" button would be quick. This also asks the question if there should be a Constituency Moderator.