Business Wire
Voting Solutions to Release
Voting Software under Open License November 03, 2003
OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Voting Solutions, LLC, in
association with the Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD),
announced its plans to release ChoicePlus Pro (TM) under an open
source license and development agreement.
ChoicePlus Pro is
used to process ballot data for alternative forms of elections, such
as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and Choice Voting, also known as
Single Transferable Voting (STV). Current users of the software
include: the City of Cambridge, MA, for its City Council and School
Committee elections; the Pacifica Foundation, for the board
elections of its public radio stations; the Fonterra Dairy
Cooperative of New Zealand, the country's largest dairy producing
enterprise, for its governing board; and a number of other
corporations and organizations for their leadership elections.
ChoicePlus Pro has been distributed as proprietary
commercial software by Voting Solutions. However, due to increasing
alarm concerning the accuracy, security, and transparency of a wide
variety of proprietary commercial software and election systems used
for public elections, Voting Solutions believes that the lack of a
well developed, tested, open-source package for processing elections
is hindering the adoption of much needed election reforms.
"The accuracy of our elections as well as a number of
meaningful electoral reforms, including instant runoff voting and
full representation, can be greatly enhanced with the use of
computers and electronic processing of ballots," explained Rob
Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy
(www.FairVote.org), a national nonpartisan,
non-profit organization promoting fair elections where every vote
counts and all voters are represented. "With our partnership on this
open source project, we intend to make publicly available software
to count ranked ballot elections and to establish a new standard for
transparency and integrity in election software."
"We believe that a
project like this will succeed if it is supported by a large group
of dedicated programmers," noted Jim Lindsay, chief architect of
ChoicePlus Pro (aka PR Master) and CTO of Voting Solutions. "An
open-source programming project such as this can bring together
programmers from around the world who support election reform and
have the experience to release this software under open license and
document and support the product for
maximum public benefit."
Interested parties can
learn more about this project
and can email [email protected]
for more information. To speak to a human:
Caleb Kleppner
Center for Voting and Democracy
415-824-2735
Steve Willett
Voting Solutions, LLC 510-654-7818 Editor/Media Contact
Bill Gram-Reefer
WORLDVIEW PR
925-676-4733
|