jeff.oneill's blog

To understand different voting methods, it can be helpful to have ballot data from actual elections to compare results with different methods. In order to help OpenSTV users understand the different counting methods and to help support the development of OpenSTV, we make the following ballot files available for $3 each. These files may be used with the latest version of OpenSTV and have been created from publicly available documents.

• Burlington Mayor 2006
• Burlington Mayor 2009
• Dublin North 2002
  

I just learned about the Electronic Voting Technology/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections 2010 Conference (EVT/WOTE '10 for short). It was held this past August and is scheduled for next August as well.

The papers from this conference are online. Unfortunately, some sessions were only video and the videos are not online.

The Right Reverend Hare had a very notable life himself, but I found it interesting that the writer of the article knew about Thomas Hare and made the connection:

• Thomas Richard Hare was born in Burma on August 29 1922. His great-grandfather, Thomas Hare, was a friend of John Stuart Mill, and responsible for devising the electoral system of proportional representation by single transferable vote (STV).

The rest of the article is here, but has nothing to do with STV.

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