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18 Jun 2012 Jim Killock election-2012

Board election result

Thank you everyone for participating and helping with the election, but especially Rob Myers and David Gerard for conducting the count and Lee Maguire for preparing OpenSTV to process the data; Terence Eden for helping on the elections committee and Francis Davey for his help and advice.

The result of the election is that

Owen Blacker
John Elliott
Milena Popova

have been duly elected to the Open Rights Group Board. They will be formally appointed shortly.

The data from the election is available, if you wish to check. The process was that:

  1. The ballots were numbered 2-266  
  2. They were entered into two spreadsheets with each ballot being on the numbered row
  3. Five ballots had to be interpreted or problems noted (see below)
  4. The spreadshets were exported as CSV files and compared via diff
  5. One data entry difference was detected and corrected
  6. A python script was used to transform the CSV file into a BLT (“ballot”) file for OpenSTV
  7. The data was processed by OpenSTV using a modified version of the MeekSTV algorithm that protects the RON candidate
  8. The data was processed by OpenSTV using the standard version of the MeekSTV algorithm as a sanity check; the dubious double votes were also removed and run for a sanity check9 This data will be provided to candidates with a provisional result
  9. Candidates had until the end of Sunday to check for errors or to ask to examine the ballot papers

The code used is available at Debian and Github

The lines run were:

python ./rankfile.py -n 3 org-board-2012.csv > org-board-2012.blt
openstv-run-election -r TextReport MeekSTV org-board-2012.blt >org-board-2012-ifstv.txt
openstv-run-election -r TextReport MeekSTVRon org-board-2012.blt > org-board-2012-result.txt

Note on ballot queries

  • Paper 050 included double votes
  • Paper 063 tick in “RON” interpreted as 7 (final choice)
  • Paper 089 included double vote
  • Paper 209 included double votes
  • Paper 228 “0” in RON interpreted as NULL

Double votes were entered and interpreted according to the software at conversion to a BLT file