A couple of updates from OpaVote!

(1) California RCV election results

Most of you know that four cities in California (San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro) used ranked-choice voting for elections such as mayor and city council.

One fantastic feature of their implementations of these elections is that they make the official ballot files available for download. Anyone can download the ballots and count them independently to verify that the ballots were counted correctly. I downloaded the ballots, converted them the format supported by OpaVote and OpenSTV, and put the results online here:
http://www.opavote.org/vote/709201
(I skipped elections where there was a majority in the first round as they are not very interesting.)

Time to show off the first real OpaVote poll for Facebook! Try this ranked-voting poll for U.S. President with third-party candidates.

The poll is integrated with the facebook authentication system so each facebook voter is limited to one vote. Please vote in the poll and share with your friends to spread the word about ranked-choice voting.

I am working on extending the facebook integration so eventually I hope to have all OpaVote features integrated with facebook.

Also, please like the OpaVote facebook page if you haven't already. I'm at 63 now and would be great to reach 100!

OpenSTV 2.1.0 is now available for download! As most of my work in the last year has been on improving OpaVote, there are not a lot of new features for OpenSTV. The primary new feature is the ability to save election results in HTML format with pretty bar charts. You can also now save Condorcet results in HTML format but still working on the best graphics to visualize Condorcet results.

The most exciting new feature for OpaVote is full encryption for election voting pages! Since voting pages are now encrypted with SSL, OpaVote can be used with confidence even for elections where people are motivated to try to cheat the system. The weakest link in an OpaVote election is now the security of the individual voter's email accounts.

In this issue:

• New Democracy Day / Democracy Week Website
• Dine for Democracy Sept 15-22, 2012
• Democracy Week petition campaign

New Democracy Day / Democracy Week Website

Democracy Day and Democracy Week now have their own dedicated website, brought to you by Fair Vote Canada! We plan to make Democracy Week an annual event, and this site will become a one-stop shop for Democracy Day/Week related events coast to coast.

Visit www.democracyday.ca to find out about events and activities scheduled in your region, or make sure people know about your event by posting it on the calendar there.

The Proportional Representation Society of Australia (NSW Branch) has changed its name to Electoral Reform Australia! The latest Largest Remainder newsletter announces the name change and has the following articles. The full newsletter is available here and you can find an excerpt below.

In this Issue:

• Change of name
• Correction
• Editorial
• Lessons from the Queensland 2012 State Election, by Mark Rodowicz

Change of Name