Does Open elections code cover "election management"

[Paul Brian]

This link might tell you more (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402398)
I am a UK developer who believes that Open is the way forward for all public sector software. (www.oss4gov.org)

An opportunity sprang up to supply a council in UK with "election management software" - integrate the official poll records, print off the cards, arrange rotas etc

I see election software as a poster child app for OSS simply because it's sooo obviously only a government need yet it is not possible to see the software.

(preaching to the choir)

But the council wants an existing, already deployed solution and does not seem persuaded to go for development costs upfront

What I want to do is break in one small foothold to kick start some sort of Eco system of UK OSS devs, proving that once we get in it can all change

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[Paul Brian]

sorry it's late at night : does openelections code cover this? Are there installed examples in the US? How much can a python dev expand your codebase? what is the core work the code base does if not the above

thank you - looks and exciting project and a python one i not heard of

[Robert Cheetham]

Paul,

This is a topic near and dear to my heart.  I don't know if any comprehensive election data management solution that is also open source.  The only time I've seen it come into focus was in an RFP that the State of Vermont released last summer, specifically requesting such a open source solution.  They didn't get any takers, and my understanding (through the grapevine) is that they went with one of the commercial providers.  My firm, Azavea, considered going after the RFP, but we really focus on geographic data, and there wasn't enough geography in the specs to hit our sweet spot.  But I still have the RFP and technical spec.  They are large-ish documents to attach, so please contact me off-list if you would like a copy.

I think there are a number of modules that would be required to build such a system, including:

 * Voter list management

 * Voter registration management

 * Absentee ballot management

 * Ballot design

 * Polling location management

 * Compile election results

 * Manage voting equipment assets

 * Manage and schedule poll workers

 * Voting district/precinct boundary management

 * Legislative district boundary management

 * Campaign finance (optional, as administration of this function varies from place to place)

 * Public - polling place lookup (combines voting district/precinct and polling places)

 * Public - legislative district lookup

 * Public - voter registration

 * Public - publish election results

 * Public - campaign finance publication/search/research

 * Public - open APIs for all of the above public functions

And probably more.

There may be parts of this (like public polling place finders and legislative district lookup) that already exist, but the specific ones I can point to are:

 * DistrictBuilder - http://www.districtbuilder.org/ - an open source tool for district boundary editing and management (full disclosure: Azavea developed most of this)

 * Represent Canada - https://github.com/opennorth/represent-canada - Open North's project for legislative district and other boundary lookups

 * MapIt - http://www.mysociety.org/for-organisations/mapit/ - MySociety project for boundary lookups

Best,

Robert

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