Approval Voting Software

[Andy Jennings]

If an elementary, middle, or high school wanted to run its student body
election with Approval Voting, is there good software out there for them to
use?

[Kevin Baas]

Opavote's pretty good.

http://www.opavote.com/

Only caveat is it's not FOSS (Free and Open Source), so you can't see the code.  But unless you're running a major political election I'm sure you can trust the programmer well enough.

[Brian Olson]

Hand counted paper ballots.

Approval is just so simple, at this scale of election, why do anything else?

Hand count every ballot three times, it would still be cost effective for a public election to pay people for this, and I bet high school students could be pressed into service to do this as part of some class project.

Estimate the time: ((number of ballots) / (ballots per minute)) * (count redundancy factor) = (person minutes to count all the ballots)
get 20-40 students (a class or two?) to count.

Sub-counts are trivially summable.

Split the ballots into several batches and count each batch 1-3 times to make sure each batch is well counted. Sum the batches into the total count.

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[Steve Cobb]

You have to define what "run an election" means. Online voting, or paper ballots? Scanned or hand counted?

As CES has done in its straw polls, it is pretty simple to scan paper ballots. 

On Tuesday, July 12, 2016 at 6:06:58 PM UTC+2, Brian Olson wrote:

Hand counted paper ballots.

Approval is just so simple, at this scale of election, why do anything else?

Hand count every ballot three times, it would still be cost effective for a public election to pay people for this, and I bet high school students could be pressed into service to do this as part of some class project.

Estimate the time: ((number of ballots) / (ballots per minute)) * (count redundancy factor) = (person minutes to count all the ballots)
get 20-40 students (a class or two?) to count.

Sub-counts are trivially summable.

Split the ballots into several batches and count each batch 1-3 times to make sure each batch is well counted. Sum the batches into the total count.

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Kevin Baaswrote:

Opavote's pretty good.

http://www.opavote.com/

Only caveat is it's not FOSS (Free and Open Source), so you can't see the code.  But unless you're running a major political election I'm sure you can trust the programmer well enough.

On Monday, July 11, 2016 at 7:51:52 AM UTC-5, Andrew Jennings wrote:

If an elementary, middle, or high school wanted to run its student body
election with Approval Voting, is there good software out there for them to
use?

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[Andy Jennings]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 6:21 AM, 'Steve Cobb' via The Center for Election Science <electio...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

You have to define what "run an election" means. Online voting, or paper ballots? Scanned or hand counted?

As CES has done in its straw polls, it is pretty simple to scan paper ballots. 

I was thinking of an online vote.

Some friends and I want to make a proposal to the local schools here, so we just want to make it as easy as possible.  (And make them look as good as possible.)

I think they have issued cheap laptops to all the high school students, so an online vote should be fine.

I will look into Opavote.