Hi folks!
I'm proud to announce abiftool v0.32.0 and awt v0.32.0, which are:
- abiftool <https://electorama.com/abiftool> — a command-line tool for working with election files, converting from other formats into ABIF <https://electowiki.org/wiki/ABIF> (and vice versa), and tallying elections using many systems (Copeland/Condorcet
- awt <https://electorama.com/awt> — the web front-end for abiftool.
A live instance of awt can be found at abif.electorama.com. New! SF 2024 elections, FPTP support, caching, improved testing, and bug fixes
Both awt and abiftool use the abiflib library found in the abiftool repository. Some important advancements in abiflib since the 0.2.0 <https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1ihxmw8/over_400_elections_now_at_abifelectoramacom/> release of abiftool back in February 2025: * Handling of San Francisco's latest JSON-based CVRs (see the "sf2024" tag <https://abif.electorama.com/tag/sf2024>). * Initial implementation of First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) tabulation. * Many micro-features hidden in command-line options. * Substantial refactoring of abiflib. * General code cleanup and major improvements throughout. * Much more robust pytests and more of them.
Additonally, here's a big improvement in awt * Caching! All prior versions computed the results of the static abif under abif.electorama.com/id/* <https://abif.electorama.com/id> dynamically, which was silly. As a result, the website was often dog slow. Now it is only cat slow.
If you tried this out in February and had a poor experience because the many bugs and server timeouts in 0.2.0, come back and try it again. This version is *much* more reliable (he says, automatically jinxing awt to have a serious bug that is obvious to everyone but himself). Bugs, feature requests, other ways to get involved
Speaking of bug discovery, bug reporting, and feature requests, there's no end of work to do on abiftool and awt, and your help would be greatly appreciated (even if you aren't a software developer). Please visit abif.electorama.com, and if you find any bugs or think of any features you like to see, file a ticket at github.com/electorama/awt/issues. If you find a problem, don't assume that anyone else knows about it -- getting something in the issue tracker is the best way to ensure someone deals with it. If you're a software developer and want to help, reach out to me; I'm easy to get in touch with (see robla.net and electorama.com).
You can help shape the future direction of abiftool and awt:
- There's a lot of user interface work that needs to happen with awt. I'm more of a backend developer and text-file twiddler (hence the appeal of ABIF to me), but I recognize many folks have less of tolerance for "ugly" user interfaces than I do. If you fancy yourself a front-end developer looking for a project to make an impact with, talk to me.
- Many more formats can be added to and there are many formats that seem worth adding (both for conversion *to* and *from* ABIF).
- Keep tweaking at it. There's lot's of smaller features that would be nifty to have (like better display of ties in IRV <https://github.com/electorama/awt/issues/7>).
- Merging with other websites/codebases. This is by no means the first public election software (see also stablevoting.org, preflib.org, Votelib <https://github.com/simberaj/votelib>, rob-legrand.github.io <https://rob-legrand.github.io/ranked-ballot-voting-calculator/> and ranked.vote for just a few). There's already some integration/interoperability with some tools [e.g. with the ABIF reader in the pref_voting library <https://github.com/voting-tools/pref_voting/blob/main/pref_voting/io/readers.py> or the experimental ABIF branch in Votelib <https://github.com/simberaj/votelib/tree/abif>), but the combinatorial aspects of interoperability between tools mean there's practically infinite work to do.
There's a lot of different ways software-developer activitsts can spend their time. What's the *best* way? For that matter, what's a *good enough* way? Join the conversation!
To discuss awt and abiftool (and election software more , a good mailing list to join is the election-software mailing list:
...or if you prefer chat, you can join the Electorama Discord server.
...or just get the code and start hacking! Get the code!
To get the source code, visit the GitHub projects for awt and abif below:
...or just visit abif.electorama.com.
Rob