ElectionAudits software

The ElectionAudits software project provides open source software and documentation in support of the Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits and the other work of ElectionAudits.org, the nation's clearinghouse for election audit information.

It was used in the official Boulder County 2008 General Election Audit, which was written up as one of the first risk-sensitive audits. An overview, the audit procedure, and detailed reports and results can be found at the site.

Get more background on the need for auditing, and the rollout of this software at ElectionAudits software - help audit the election!. The "ToDo" file in the latest development version also gives the latest insights into how you can contribute.

Features:

ElectionAudits helps with several facets of the task of auditing elections:

Imports standard election report files
Protects voter anonymity by combining results for very small precincts or batches into larger audit units.
Enables audits of central-count systems and mail-in ballots without requiring that the paper ballots be sorted into piles by precinct. Works with election systems which can't produce batch results, by importing full election results for each batch and subtracting the result for the previous batch from the current batch.
Facilitates risk-limiting audits by calculating relevant statistics based on the margin, number, size, and results of the audit units. Support for various selection procedures, including NEGEXP and many aspects of PPEBWR and SAFE, is provided, with more on the drawing board.
Implements "Sum of Square Roots" (SSR) Pseudorandom Sampling Method, which allows the entire set of selections for both contests and audit units with a contest to be automated based on a truly random seed value generated from dice throws. The selections are easy for the public to verify.
Convenient platform for publication and archiving of auditable reports for the public.
Ad-hoc query calculator form lets you quickly enter information about hypothetical contests and get selection statistics for them also. This supports planning for future audits, e.g. deciding how many batches to report on so as to minimize the fraction of the ballots you'll have to audit.
Helps candidates target unusual audit units for elective audit [planned].

The software is written in Python and uses the Django web framework to display results either locally or globally. It is licensed as open source under the "MIT" license and is still in very active development.

News

Major news is published at News and Announcements, which has an Atom/RSS feed.

You can follow development more closely at the project's Launchpad.net site:

https://launchpad.net/electionaudits

That is the place to follow announcements, download releases, file bugs, get the latest revisions of the source code, make contributions, etc.

You can also join the ElectionAudits team on Launchpad and subscribe to the mailing list.

Examples

Here is a demo site to show what the dynamically generated web site looks like:

ElectionAudits demo site

Start with the Audit Reports page.

You can also see real election data at the official Boulder County 2008 Audit site. That site is a copy of the dynamic pages generated by ElectionAudits.

What you need

The README file talks about what you need to install and run the software.

The first focus of development was to deal with the "batching" problem for central-count systems. So the software program can parse a series of detailed "cumulative" election reports from the Hart system, one per batch of ballots. It then subtracts one from another and generates the results for each batch in an auditable report.

Here is an example of the "crystalreports" xml format that Hart's Tally software generates, which is one of the input formats ElectionAudits parses. It is a "cumulative" report with totals for each race, and is about a megabyte long.

cum_Lat1B_001_mbb_010.xml

Here is an example of the comma-separated-values (csv) format that San Mateo county uses, which ElectionAudits can also parse. There is one line per precinct per candidate, with columns for total votes, absentee votes, early votes, and election (in-precinct) votes, among others.

test-san-mateo-dp-92-p.csv

Related work

ElectionAudits.org - official ElectionAudits site
ElectionAudits community site
Philip B. Stark, Papers and Talks on Voting and Election Auditing
Percentage-based versus SAFE Vote Tabulation Auditing: A Graphic Comparison - including the SAFE paper, spreadsheets, etc.
DiceHash - Publicly verifiable random number generator from Arel Cordero
Dice Binning Calculator for Post-Election Audits from Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Election Integrity Audit Calculator from National Election Data Archive
Pvote - open-source prototype software for electronic voting machines, also written in Python