I obtained a copy of the of final ballots for the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council and School Committee elections and used OpenSTV to verify the official count.
You can download a PDF reports of the City Council election and School Committee election created using OpenSTV, and compare them to the official results at the website for the Cambridge Election commission.
Cambridge held its STV elections for city council and school committee last night, and since I live nearby, I decided to stop by and watch how they count the votes. Cambridge has been doing STV elections since 1941, and it shows by how organized they are. Here is my understanding of how the vote counting worked.
Cambridge uses ballots where the voters fill in bubbles with a pen to rank the candidates. Here is an example of this year's ballot.
Sequioa Voting Systems makes voting machines, e.g., the physical devices that one uses to enter votes. Historically, these voting machines are called "voting systems," which can be confusing since other people use the term "voting system" to refer to the method of counting votes, e.g., instant runoff voting.
Sequioa has recently announced that it will release an open-source voting system. Here is a quote from the press release:
Announcing OpenSTV version 1.5 -- Software for computing the single
transferable vote, instant runoff voting, Condorcet, approval, and many
other voting systems. More details and download links are at
http://www.OpenSTV.org.
The most significant changes in this release are the following:
-- Improved format of election results
-- No limit on the number of candidates (previously was limited to 255
candidates)
-- Election methods are now done as plugins so users can add their own
methods (although only for advanced users at this point).
-- Cambridge STV can save the winner's ballots in files for determining
replacements after a vacancy
-- Added statutes of some rules to the documentation
-- Added draft of New Zealand Meek (work in progress)
-- Added new method called QPQ
Tim Fletcher has created an easy-to-use online Google app called Instant STV. With his app you specify a ballot file, select one of three methods (ERS97, Meek, and Warren), and request output in text or HTML. His app allows you to try OpenSTV before installing it on your computer.
The desktop version of OpenSTV has additional features that are not supported in Tim's app, such as numerous additional counting methods and the ability to create and edit ballot files.
