Voting system for elections

[Ian Jackson]

Susan Spencer writes ("Re: Voting system for elections"):
> Which STV software has both:
> 
> 1. open source license
> 2. recent commits

I think asking for recent commits is not really sensible.  In general
the meme that software is only useable, or only of high quality, if it
is constantly being modified is harmful.  There are many programs I
use frequently which are hardly ever modified.  They provide a
pleasing level of stability and reliability.

To demonstrate this point, in direct answer to your question:

  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~ian/git?p=appendix-a6.git;a=blob;f=compute-scottish-stv;h=98ec3082bd92de269a79af720f4ba8472c8f163a;hb=HEAD

I wrote that on Sunday afternoon.

(Commits in that repo since then were simply to enable me to
mechanically compare its functionality with OpenSTV.  I am pleased to
be able to report that when I used SPI's recent board election as a
test case, OpenSTV and my own program produced identical results.  Ie,
I did not need to fix any further bugs in either implementation.)

Of course my tool is not really productised or packaged.  But that
just goes to show that `has recent commits' is not the best criterion
for software quality.  https://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openstv.html
seems to me to show a package in reasonably good shape.

If SPI wants to use STV for future board elections I will happily
reimplement Scottish STV again in whatever language, and with whatever
input and output forwards, are thought desirable.

Ian.