ConcreteSTV

ConcreteSTV is a suite of programs used to count Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, which are a form of preferential voting used to elect multiple candidates. They are widely used in Australian elections.

Unlike many forms of voting, the actual counting of STV elections is not trivial, and indeed there are many plausible quite different sets of rules for STV. The aim of ConcreteSTV is to implement versions of STV that are actually used in a variety of jurisdictions. This emphasis on perfectly matching the algorithms used in actual, concrete elections is where the name comes from. This includes emulation of the known bugs in the electoral commissions' counts.

ConcreteSTV is a rewrite of an earlier project ConcreteSTV has many new features, is much more user-friendly, is better documented, and future development will be on this project.

Results from the earlier project were used to find and fix bugs in the 2020 ACT STV count, and to identify bugs in the 2012 and 2016 NSW count which led the NSW Parliament to simplify the rules. Everyone is encouraged to use this code to double-check and correct election results.

Results from this project were used to find bugs in the 2013, 2016 and 2019 Federal counts resulting in legislation change resolving some of the issues.

Other STV counting programs include Grahame Bowland's Dividebatur and its successor Dividebatur2, Lee Yingtong Li's OpenTally, Milad Ghale's formally verified STV, and Ramon Bouckaert's CountBack. Please contact me (address at the bottom) if you would like to be added to this list.

Currently Supported Election Rules

ConcreteSTV supports a variety of different rules. Each jurisdiction generally has its own legislation, which changes over time, and then there is the actual implementation by the electoral commission which is often buggy. ConcreteSTV aims to both provide the option of a correct count, and also the ability to emulate the bugs of present in a particular year's count. There are also often ambiguities in the legislation, in which case ConcreteSTV generally follows the corresponding electoral commission's interpretation, unless that changes over time.

See ElectionRules.md for a detailed description of what each of the below options means.

FederalPre2021 Federal Senate, my interpretation of the correct rules prior to the 2021 changes. Formerly named Federal.
FederalPost2021 Federal Senate, my interpretation of the correct rules for electronic counting after the 2021 changes.
FederalPost2021Manual Federal Senate, my interpretation of the correct rules for manual counting after the 2021 changes.
AEC2013 Buggy rules used by AEC in 2013 and 2014 Federal Senate elections (bug never came up in 2014)
AEC2016 Buggy rules used by AEC in 2016 Federal Senate election
AEC2019 Buggy rules used by AEC in 2019 and 2022 Federal Senate elections
ACTPre2020 Rules used for ACT Legislative Assembly by ElectionsACT prior to 2020.
ACT2020 Very buggy rules used by ElectionsACT in 2020
ACT2021 Rules that should have been used by ElectionsACT in 2020 and were used for the 2021 recount.
NSWECRandomLGE2012 Buggy rules used by the NSWEC in the 2012 NSW Local Government elections.
NSWECRandomLGE2016 Buggy rules used by the NSWEC in the 2016 NSW Local Government elections.
NSWECRandomLGE2017 Rules used by the NSWEC in the 2017 NSW Local Government elections.
NSWLocalGov2021 My dubious interpretation of the new, very ambiguous, legislation for NSW local government elections introduced before the 2021 elections.
NSWECLocalGov2021 or NSWECLocalGov2021Literal Possible rules used by the NSWEC in the 2021 local government elections. This differs in many respects from my interpretation of the very ambiguous legislation. See my thoughts for details.
NSWECRandomLC2015 Possibly buggy rules used by the NSWEC in the 2015 Legislative Council elections.
NSWECRandomLC2019 Rules used by the NSWEC in the 2019 and 2023 Legislative Council elections.
Vic2018 My interpretation of the Victorian Legislative Council rules. The 2018 refers to a contradiction in the legislation fixed in 2018, but the rules were plausible if not literal before then.
WA2008 My interpretation of the Western Australian Legislative Council rules consistent with the 2008 published official distribution of preferences.

This list is expected to grow as ConcreteSTV supports more jurisdictions.

There is some beginning support for countbacks, such as the ACT.

Note that when I describe rules as "buggy" it means I have had to purposefully introduce bugs into my interpretation of the rules in order to accurately reproduce the official results. These bugs have been reported to the appropriate electoral commissions, who have usually acknowledged and almost always subsequently fixed said bugs, either by changing their programs or the legislation covering the rules.

A short note on bugs

Bugs are expected in any computer program. I am sure ConcreteSTV contains lots of bugs. Electoral Commissions are not chosen for their competence in computer software. It is unreasonable to expect them to not have lots of bugs in their programs. What should be expected but is sadly rare is that they be transparent enough to demonstrate what they do, and commit to the rules they will use before the election.

The rules that I have implemented are my best guesses at a plausible set of rules that would produce the output that the electoral commission reported. There may well be a different set of rules that also would produce the same output.

If my program matches their output exactly, is that evidence that the correct candidates were elected? Only very weak evidence. For a start, I may have the same bug as the electoral commission. This sounds unlikely, but it actually happened once in prior work - at first my transcripts matched the AEC's perfectly in 2013, but later I found a bug in my code. More importantly, the accuracy depends on the list of the votes provided by the electroral commission, and there is rarely any meaningful evidence provided either to the public or scrutineers that these correspond to the physical ballots, and are not affected by hackers, malicious insiders, supply chain insiders, OCR errors or other bugs. This could be mitigated by public random auditing.

Note that prior to 2020, the ACT counting code was publicly available on their website. It also appeared to be the least buggy EC code in practice. This was partially due to third parties who pointed out issues before they cropped up in elections.

If you notice any bugs in ConcreteSTV, please contact me at the address at the bottom of this file.

Randomness and perfectly matching the official results

ConcreteSTV is designed to match the electoral commissions' counts perfectly. This is fairly straight forward if counting the election is deterministic.

Most STV counting is deterministic. However, sometimes there are ties that have no way of being resolved under the legislation other than random draw. There are two ways a responsible electoral commission can handle such randomness:

Perform the draws in public, and then feed them into the program. This is dealt with in ConcreteSTV using the --tie argument which actively specifies which candidates were favoured.
Use a pseudo random number generator in a program, open source the program, publish the input data for the program, and then conduct a public ceremony to determine the seed for the pseudo random number generator using something like dice. This technique is used by many USA electoral authorities to demonstrate the truth of their auditing. This is supported by the --seed argument in ConcreteSTV.

If an electoral authority does neither of these, it is usually possible to figure out what choices they made by careful investigation of the distribution of preferences and entering these into ConcreteSTV using the --tie argument. This allows ConcreteSTV to match the electoral commissions' results perfectly. When loading data from published sources, ConcreteSTV will often be able to automatically derive this information.

An exception is the NSW randomized counting algorithms, which involve a lot of randomness, and frequently in practice rerunning the count will cause different candidates to be elected. Here the choices made by the NSWEC are usually not visible from the provided distribution of preferences, nor is their use of a pseudo random number generator sufficiently well described to reproduce, so it is impossible to verify their results, although some errors are discoverable (see our reports).

To compile

ConcreteSTV is written in Rust. Install Rust (latest stable version recommended), then run, in this directory,

cargo build --release

This will create several binary programs in the target/release directory.

If you get an error complaining about not being able to find CC, install the package gcc and possibly g++ on most Linux distributions. If you get an error like could not link with -lssl or failed to run custom build command for ``openssl-sys v0.9.72`` , then install the package libssl-dev on Ubuntu, possibly openssl-dev on some other Linux distributions.

To get real election data (parse_ec_data)

Before we can count an election, we need the votes to count. ConcreteSTV uses a format with extension .stv to store votes and some metadata about the election.

Some electoral commissions publish a list of votes that are used as the basis of their counts. Let's choose the federal 2019 election, state Tasmania.

We will use a subdirectory of the main project for these examples.

mkdir work
cd work

The example commands are for Linux; Windows and MacOS will be very similar.

We need a .stv file containing a list of votes and some metadata. We can get this from the program parse_ec_data via the command

../target/release/parse_ec_data AEC2019 TAS --out TAS2019.stv

This says parse data for the 2019 federal election, state TAS, and put the results into the file TAS2019.stv. Running it produces an error as we don't actually have the two needed election files to parse, but it tells us where to get them (or at least one of them):

Error: Missing file SenateFirstPrefsByStateByVoteTypeDownload-24310.csv look in https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/SenateDownloadsMenu-24310-Csv.htm

Go to said URL (or use this direct link), download 'First preferences by state by vote type (CSV)' into your current directory, then try again.

Error: Missing file aec-senate-formalpreferences-24310-TAS.zip look in https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/SenateDownloadsMenu-24310-Csv.htm

Sorry, we need another file. Download 'Formal Preferences - Tasmania' from the website (or this direct link), then try again

../target/release/parse_ec_data AEC2019 TAS --out TAS2019.stv

It will parse for a second or two, and produce the desired file. Check in your directory, there should be a roughly 11MB file TAS2019.stv. You may look at it with a JSON viewer if you wish.

Election data formats understood

Currently parse_ec_data can accept (as first argument) the following elections:

Federal Senate : AEC2013, AEC2016, AEC2019 AEC
ACT Legislative assembly : ACT2008, ACT2012, ACT2016, ACT2020 ElectionsACT
NSW Local Government : NSWLG2021 NSW Election Commission See docs for specific instructions.
Victoria : VIC2014, VIC2018, VIC2022 if you have the privilege of having the data.

To count (concrete_stv)

The concrete_stv program takes in a rule specification and a .stv file, and produces a .transcript file containing the distribution of preferences for each count. We will use the AEC2019 rules for this. Use the bold names in the section "Currently Supported Election Rules" above as the name for the appropriate rules.

../target/release/concrete_stv AEC2019 TAS2019.stv --verbose

This will pause for a second as it reads the input, then print out a text version of the distribution of preferences, which is somewhat hard to read (you can skip this by not including the --verbose option). More importantly, it will also have created a roughly hundred kilobyte JSON file TAS2019_AEC2019.transcript, which we will use in the next section for a prettier view.

Note that you can pass --help as an option to either of these programs for details on options.

To view a transcript

The docs folder of this project contains a web based viewer for transcript files. Open docs/Viewer.html in a web browser. Alternatively this is hosted on github at https://andrewconway.github.io/ConcreteSTV/Viewer.html. A detailed description of a very simple example is here.

In the upper left corner, there will be a Browse button. Use it to select the TAS2019_AEC2019.transcript file from before.

This will produce a large image similar to this:

Elected candidates have a background of pale green, excluded candidates of pale red. Votes, and the differentials for each count, are listed by default; you can also see the number of papers by selecting the "Show papers" box.

You can compare this to the AEC provided transcript.

Margins and modifications.

There is a program change outcomes that can find modifications that change the outcome of the election, and thus are an upper bound on the margin. This program takes a .stv file like concrete_stv and produces a .vchange file with details of what it found.

See margins.md for details.

Example data files

The examples directory contains some interesting contrived examples where the rules used matter.

cd ../examples
../target/release/concrete_stv AEC2013 MultipleExclusionOrdering.stv

has winners W1, W2, W7, W6, W5, W4.

../target/release/concrete_stv AEC2016 MultipleExclusionOrdering.stv

has different winners: W1, W3, W4, W5, W6, W7. This demonstrates that bulk exclusion can affect who wins, on a contrived example.

../target/release/concrete_stv AEC2019 MultipleExclusionOrdering.stv

has winners W1, W3, W7, W6, W5, W4, the same as 2016 but in a different order. This shows that the priority of rule (18) affects the order in which candidates are considered elected.

File formats

The .stv, .transcript, and .vchange files are all JSON format.

The .stv files are a straight forward JSON representation of the ElectionData structure defined in election_data.rs which reference structures in ballot_paper.rs, and metadata given by the ElectionMetadata structure in ballot_metadata.rs

The .transcript files are a straight forward JSON representation of the TranscriptWithMetadata structure defined in distribution_of_preferences_transcript.rs, which uses the same metadata format.

One complication is the representation of numbers. In .stv files, there are only integers and they are represented by numbers. In .transcript files there are non-integers. These are represented in the program as ratios of integers or as scaled integers, for exact precision. Writing them as JSON numbers could lead to loss of precision.

Transfer values are stored as JSON strings, either "1" or a ratio like "34/234".
Most vote counts and ballot paper counts are stored as JSON numbers (integers).
When a vote count could be a non-integer (e.g. ACT2020 or ACT2021 rules), vote tallys are stored as strings like "345.288272". Ballot counts are still stored as JSON numbers as they are integers
Votes lost to rounding is a special case, as unlike all other numbers mentioned here it can be negative (ACT2020 rules). These are stored as JSON strings, even when using rule sets where they must be integers.

The .vchange files contain the .stv file, as well as a list of possible modifications. The only part that is not straight forward is the list of affected votes. Affected votes are represented by a multiplicity and an integer:

If less than the number of entries in the atl array in the contained .stv file, it is an index into this atl array - an above the line vote.
Otherwise, subtract the number of entries in the atl array, and it is now an index into the btl array of below the line votes.

LaTeX tables

You can convert a .stv or (more commonly) .transcript file to a LaTeX table by the transcript_to_latex program:

../target/release/transcript_to_latex --deltas MultipleExclusionOrdering_AEC2016.transcript > MultipleExclusionOrdering_AEC2016.tex

Note that these tables are generally too large to fit onto a normal page. To restrict the table to a small number of candidates, use the --candidates option. Use the --help option for details.

To import data from Preflib .soi or .soc formats, or .blt format

Preflib contains some election data. The soi and soc formats can be converted to the ConcreteSTV format using the preflib_to_stv program:

cargo build --release
wget https://www.preflib.org/static/data/irish/00001-00000001.soi
./target/release/preflib_to_stv 00001-00000001.soi
./target/release/concrete_stv AEC2013 --vacancies 1 00001-00000001.stv --verbose

will build ConcreteSTV, download a sample file from preflib, and convert it to 00001-00000001.stv, and then run it with ConcreteSTV with one vacancy.

Note that this will do a poor job of parsing metadata (like year, electorate, authority, copyright, name), and will not specify vacancies, so one must specify vacancies when running concrete_stv on it.

Similarly one can transform a .blt format to ConcreteSTV format (example given is for the Argyll Bute Council, Scotland, kudos for public release) using the blt_to_stv program:

cargo build --release
wget https://www.argyll-bute.gov.uk/sites/default/files/migrated_files/Unknown/preferenceprofile_v0001_ward-1-south-kintyre_06052022_120128.blt
./target/release/blt_to_stv preferenceprofile_v0001_ward-1-south-kintyre_06052022_120128.blt
./target/release/concrete_stv AEC2013 preferenceprofile_v0001_ward-1-south-kintyre_06052022_120128.stv --verbose

Of course, the cargo build --release only needs to be done once; it will compile (all) the ConcreteSTV executables, and the Australian rules used are inappropriate for the Irish and Scottish elections given as examples above.

Webserver

The webserver running on https://vote.andrewconway.org uses ConcreteSTV. Running your own copy is described in ElectionDatabase.md

Testing

Some of the tests (run with cargo test) require real data files downloaded from the appropriate electoral commissions. See ElectionDatabase.md for details.

Copyright

This file is part of ConcreteSTV.

With the exception of specific files mentioned below, ConcreteSTV is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

ConcreteSTV is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with ConcreteSTV. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Other copyrights

This repository contains some files derived from data sources with their own separate copyrights. These files are licensed as above to the extent that they are the work of contributors to ConcreteSTV, and maintain the original copyright to the appropriate extent.

nsw/NSWLocalCouncilLegislation2021.md. Based on content from the New South Wales Legislation website at 3 Dec 2021. For the latest information on New South Wales Government legislation please go to https://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
nsw/src/NSWLGE2012_contest_list.json, nsw/src/NSWLGE2016_contest_list.json, nsw/src/NSWLGE2017_contest_list.json, nsw/src/NSWLGE2021_contest_list.json and nsw/examples/putative_lost_ivotes.csv. These lists are partially derived from data on the NSW Electoral Commission website, which is © State of New South Wales through the NSW Electoral Commission and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CCA License).
The gh-pages branch of the git repository contains companion data for some papers associated with this project. They may contain data derived from other copyrighted information. See the copyright section in the index.html describing the companion page for details (these will be in the docs folder).
The federal/legislation folder contains legislation taken from the Federal Register of Legislation and is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (the CC BY 4.0 licence). See the copyright notice for details.

Kudos to the State of New South Wales and the Federal Register of Legislation for the use of such a license.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of ConcreteSTV by any organisation listed here.

Or course any files you download from electoral commissions (or elsewhere) are likely covered by their own licenses.

Contact

Contact the author andrew at andrewconway.org

AndrewConway / ConcreteSTV