[ELECTIONS] Preview the ballot & voting mechanism

[Sir Lüc]

Azul, the Chancery is pleased to release to the public a preview-mode version of the ballot for the upcoming General Elections. You can find it at https://database.talossa.com/elections/august-2026-elections/preview.

If you log in to the Database beforehand (should you have credentials), you will receive a voting confirmation email which in itself is a preview of what everyone will receive when casting a vote in the actual election. This is a new feature that was still missing from the new Database.

Other changes with respect to the previous election include:

• Redesigned party options, incl. to offer a better experience on mobile
• A confirmation modal to recap your choices and make sure voters's choices are recorded properly (including warning when parts have been left blank or when there are duplicate ranked votes)
• Various visual tweaks (e.g. better use of colours to visually separate parts of the ballot) and usability improvements (e.g. when selecting a write-in citizen from the dropdown, the "write-in" option will automatically be marked)

The design of the ballot, of the confirmation email and of the receipt page may receive further tweaks before voting begins.

Please use this thread for bug reporting and feedback.

[Sir Lüc]

Eeh, I have just spotted a bug in the code that meant the "Enable preview ballot" admin toggle functioned the wrong way around. Apologies for that. Because of it, the code checking for permission to actually use the preview ballot would boot users out if the option was enabled, rather than disabled, unless they were administrators, which is why I didn't spot this earlier.

This is now fixed and the preview function should work as expected.