Apache STeVe v3: How the ASF Rebuilt Its Member Voting System from Scratch
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which governs some of open source's most critical projects, recently ran its annual Members' Meeting election on a fully rebuilt version of its voting platform, Apache STeVe v3. The system allows roughly 800 ASF members to elect a Board of Directors and admit new members without any corporate or vendor influence over the process. Built on modern tools including Python's asfquart framework, Bootstrap, and SortableJS, the new version was developed as a standard open-source Apache project with public code and community-driven decisions. A key feature of STeVe v3 is its privacy architecture: every vote is encrypted using Argon2 key derivation and Fernet symmetric encryption, ensuring no ballot can be linked to an individual voter — even by the system's own administrators. The tally process intentionally takes 15 to 60 minutes due to the computational cost of reversing the encryption, a deliberate design choice that strengthens security as hardware improves over time.
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