Many users of OpenSTV are no doubt aware that voting is fascinating subject from a mathematical perspective. The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics have announced that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month 2008 is Math and Voting!
OpenSTV 1.2 is now available. The most significant changes in this release are the following:
- Changed output to be more descriptive and easier to read.
- Changed implementation of Supplemental Vote to use all rankings.
- Changed implementation of IRV to stop sooner (won't change outcome).
- Print substages for ERS97 STV.
- Now possible to have unlimited precision (but max is set to 20 for gui).
- Meek/Warren implemented in fixed point.
We would greatly appreciate assistance in further developing this
software. We are looking for Python programmers (or people willing to
learn). Please contact me if you are willing to help.
The city of Cambridge, MA has been using STV to elect its city council and school committee since 1941. Here are some links to interesting information about the 2007 election and historical information about every election going back to 1941. For instance, the 1941 city council election had more than 80 candidates and took 77 rounds of counting! All done by hand of course.
OpenSTV has a fantastic new web page thanks to the hard work of Renee and Jesse at IDC WebDev. We hope that the new page will be a valuable source of information about STV and also hope to blog about STV events around the world. Please be patient as we add content to the website and check back regularly for more information.
The June issue of Linux Journal magazine has included a brief writeup on OpenSTV in its New Products section. You need a subscription to view the magazine online, but here is the text of the article:
OpenSTV
