For the 2016-17 school year election, the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Associated Students adopted single transferable voting¹ to elect their senate seats. Leading the software development, the tabulator is implemented in Python 3 with a wxPython-based front end. The software provides support for custom parsers to convert ballot data from different polling software to a universal JSON data format which is then processed by the tabulator. The software is divided into a backend thread that processes the election tabulation data and a modular front-end to allow for future alternative front-end implementations.
As of December 2016, the election tabulator using STV has been open sourced and is available on GitHub. It is currently in use by the University of California, Santa Barbara, and North Dakota State University.
¹ Single transferable voting is a ranked voting system that redistributes an elector’s vote among unelected candidates based upon the individual’s ranked preference when either a candidate has been elected or eliminated from a race. This system provides a more proportional representation of parties during a multi-seat election.
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