Single Transferable Vote and Instant Runoff Voting Software
OpenSTV is open-source software for implementing the single transferable vote and other voting methods such as instant runoff voting, Condorcet voting, and approval voting. OpenSTV is the only open-source software that implements the single transferable vote exactly as used by governments, including Scotland and the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These methods have been extensively verified against other software and/or actual election results.
Organizations can use OpenSTV to implement their own elections. First, the organization must adopt a voting method. Second, the organization must conduct the vote, and this will most likely be done with paper ballots. Third, the ballots must be entered into the OpenSTV program. Finally, you can use OpenSTV to count the votes and determine the winners of the election.
OpenSTV will run on MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. To download OpenSTV to your computer, select the download link at the top of the page. Please send questions to the email list:
openstv at googlegroups.com
The first release of OpenSTV (then pSTV) was October 20, 2003. Since the beginning, the web site has had a donation box. With the release of OpenSTV 1.5 this past March, I also included a donation request in the header of the election results. For anyone interested in the economics of open-source software, here is a summary of donations received.
From the website donation box, there have been two donations: $250 in December 2007 and $25 in February 2010. Both related to commercial use of OpenSTV. The first was a labor union in Canada, and the second was the popular Q&A site Stack Overflow.
We are releasing a new version of OpenSTV (1.6.1) to fix two bugs:
(1) Some users have had problems installing OpenSTV on Windows
computers, and the Windows installer has been fixed to prevent this
from happening.
(2) When saving a ballot file, OpenSTV would generate an error if the
user didn't include a file extension (e.g., ".blt"). OpenSTV now adds
a .blt extension if the user does not provide one.
Please download the new version from:
http://www.openstv.org/download
A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article in NewScientist. Here is an excerpt:
- IN AN ideal world, elections should be two things: free and fair. Every adult, with a few sensible exceptions, should be able to vote for a candidate of their choice, and each single vote should be worth the same.
A new version of OpenSTV, version 1.6, is now available for download by using the download link at the top of the page.
New features in this version include:
- Ties can be broken manually in addition to randomly,
- Plugin support for different election report types,
- Allows ballots with duplicate and skipped rankings and ballot IDs, and
- Improvements to speed and usability.
Since about 2001, the website DemoChoice.org has been providing a voter interface system for running elections with instant runoff voting and the single transferable vote. Separately, OpenSTV has been providing a desktop application and vote-counting engine since 2003.
The developers of DemoChoice and OpenSTV have come together to create a joint effort that incorporates the best of both projects. DemoChoice now has a version that uses OpenSTV's vote counting engine at http://openstv.demochoice.org/.
This version of DemoChoice supports most of OpenSTV's counting methods, and allows you to run a complete election, from collecting the votes to displaying the election results.
