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:

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