This program reads either approval-style ballots from a CSV file or ranked-style ballots from a BLT file. It returns the tallied results to the console using
- Approval Voting
- Net Approval Voting
- Satisfaction Approval Voting
- Proportional Approval Voting
- Sequential Proportional Approval Voting
- Single Transferable Vote using Droop quota and Wright redistribution
To build the software from the source code, make sure that you have at least Java 9, though I recommend installing the latest version of Java. To check which Java have installed, if any, run the following command from the command line:
java --version
In addition to Java, building the software from scratch requires Maven, which can be downloaded from:
Once all the project has been downloaded into a directory, and both Java and Maven have been installed, build using the following command from within the directory with the project:
mvn package
The result of the build will be placed in the target subdirectory.
Once the software has been built or downloaded in JAR form, run the project using the following command:
java -jar ./target/ballot-counter-0.0.3.jar <filepath> [seat_count] [max_proportional_slates]
where is the path to the ballot data file.
Optionally, include the number of seats to be filled and the max number of proportional slates to be returned in the results.
The format of the CSV file consists of a header line with all of the candidates followed by lines representing each ballot. A non-empty entry in the same index location (column) as the candidate in the header line indicates a vote for that candidate. Example:
Hillary Clinton,Donald Trump,Gary Johnson,Jill Stein,Mike Maturen
,2,,,5
1,,,,
,,3,4,5
indicates that there are five candidates and three ballots with the first ballot containing votes for Trump and Maturen, the second ballot containing a vote for Clinton, and the third ballot containing votes for Johnson, Stein, and Maturen.
Note that this format is easily exportable from SurveyMonkey.
The BLT file format is that first described by Hill, Wichmann & Woodall in Algorithm 123 - Single Transferable Vote by Meek's method (1987) and popularized by OpenSTV.
Copyright © 2018 Desmond Silveira. All rights reserved.
This software is free to use and extend to all registered members of the American Solidarity Party. Any extensions must give credit to the author and preserve this notice.