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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


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