Vote Counter

An opinionated single transferrable vote counter for the command line.

Installation

Installation can be done via cargo by running:

cargo install vote-counter

Demo

A sample csv file in the appropriate format is provided at the top level of this repository. Run:

vote-counter sample.csv --report

to count the votes from that file.

Arguments

Running vote-counter --help will output the following:

USAGE:
    vote-counter [OPTIONS] <PATH>

ARGS:
    <PATH>    Path to the CSV containing the ballots

OPTIONS:
    -h, --help                     Print help information
        --report                   Generate report of counting
    -t, --threshold <THRESHOLD>    Threshold to win [default: 0.5]
    -V, --version                  Print version information

explaining each argument and how to use it.

Ballot File

The ballot file should be a csv formatted as below:

Peter	Mia	Hannah	Lee	Fred	Julia
	2	1			3
1		2	3	4
5	4	3	1	2	6

Each row represents a ballot paper, where preferenced are expressed starting at 1, and continuing until the voter no longer has a preference.

Validity of Votes

This program is generally permissive in the votes that are considered valid. If a ballot includes any number of non-negative preference numbers, none of which are repeating, the ballot is valid.

An invalid ballot occurs when the same preference is expressed twice.

For example, the following are not valid:

Peter	Mia	Hannah	Lee	Fred	Julia
1	1		3
0	1		4		4
2		2		1

However the following are valid:

Peter	Mia	Hannah	Lee	Fred	Julia
0	1	2			3
		1	4
2		5			1

Negative numbers are simply ignored.