Registered by Neal McBurnett

The ElectionAudits software project provides software and documentation in support of best-in-class audits of elections.

Note: the most recent code base is now available at github: https://github.com/nealmcb/electionaudits

ElectionAudits adheres to the Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits documented at http://electionaudits.org/principles

Get more background on the need for auditing, and the rollout of this software
at http://neal.mcburnett.org/blog/2008/10/18/electionaudits-software-help-audit-election/

It helps with several facets of the task of auditing elections:
    * Imports common 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.
    * Supports risk-limiting audits by calculating relevant statistics based on the margin, results, error bounds, number, and size of the audit units. Does Kaplan-Markov analysis of discrepancies to get conservative confidence levels. Support for various selection procedures, including PPEBWR and NEGEXP and many aspects of SAFE, is provided.
    * 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.
    * Provides information to help candidates, parties, or other observers target unusual audit units for elective audit.
    * Exports data in the standard Election Markup Language, including EML 510.
    * Can be used to convert election data from vendor formats into EML.

ElectionAudits was used in the Boulder County General Election Audits for 2008 and 2010. See e.g.
    * http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/boulder-audit-10-11/
    * http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/boulder-audit-08-11/

Project information

Maintainer:
Neal McBurnett
Driver:
Not yet selected
Licence:
MIT / X / Expat Licence

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trunk series is the current focus of development.

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Version control system:
Bazaar
Programming languages:
python

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Latest version is 0.9
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