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The Free & Fair Tabulator tallies digital Cast Vote Records, specified in an open JSON-based format, into an election result. The Tabulator is formally specified in BON and Coq, and is implemented via extraction to Haskell from Coq and in SPARK.

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Tabulator

The Free & Fair Tabulator tallies digital Cast Vote Records, specified in an open JSON-based format, into an election result.

The Tabulator is a rigorously engineered high assurance system. Its quality level is comparable to the best software ever written, conforming to [Common Criteria][CC] [EAL][eal] 7+.

The Tabulator is formally specified in BON and Coq, and is implemented via extraction to Haskell or OCaml from Coq, and by hand in SPARK.

Tabulator's specifications and implementations are all formally reviewed by domain experts, formally verified using mechanical proof tools, and rigorously validated using artifacts synthesized from those formal tools. As such, this work is incomparable to any other work in the elections space worldwide.

The Tabulator's development was accomplished using the Free & Fair rigorous engineering methodology, sometimes known as SNFM. All of the tools, processes, methodologies, and techniques associated with this development are published in top peer-reviewed venues. See our bibliography below for more information.

This work will inform the work of IEEE's Voting System Standards Committee (VSSC) Working Group 1622.6, "Voting Methods Mathematical Models."

Specification

The formal specification of the Tabulator comes in three parts:

  1. at the top-most abstraction level, we provide an EBON specification (EBON is Extended BON) of the Tabulator system. An EBON specification itself consists of two parts, one informal and the other formal:

    1. the informal specification of the system has five parts:
      1. a domain model of the system that describes its core concepts and their relationships,
      2. the requirements that the system must fulfill,
      3. the scenarios that the system must support,
      4. the events that the system reacts to and itself emits, and
      5. the creation structure of the system which describes critical dynamic relationships between various parts of the system and the resources that the system uses,
    2. the formal specification of the system has three parts:
      1. an architecture specification which describes the system at a high level using architectures styles,
      2. a static structural specification of the system which describes the system and its behavior in a programming language and platform-neutral fashion, and
      3. a dynamic structural specification of the system which elucidates the informal scenario and event specifications.

    This specification includes an informal and formal specification of our Cast Vote Record serialization format. As such, it constitutes a quality case study in the formalization and realization of interoperability formats in the elections domain.

  2. a formal specification of the election schemes that the Tabulator implements. Namely, we support two variants at this time:

    1. the version of ranked choice voting (RCV), also known as instant runoff voting (IRV) in the case of a single winner and the single transferable vote (STV) more generally, that is used in in San Francisco, CA, and
    2. plurality, as is used across the U.S.A. for local, state, and federal elections.
  3. a formal specification of the system using one or more [formal methods][fm]. These specifications formally describe the static structure and dynamic behavior of the system in a fashion that is amendable to static and dynamic analysis and permits us to reason about our various implementations in a rigorous fashion. The formal methods we intend to use include the [Alloy][alloy], [B][b], [RAISE][raise], [VDM][vdm], and [Z][z] formal methods.

Building

Building the Tabulator means compiling and analyzing its system specifications, double-checking its proofs, extracting an implementation from its specification, and building its manually written implementations. See the file BUILDING.md for more information.

Future Work

During the evolution of the Tabulator we intend to focus on those variants of RCV used in U.S. jurisdictions. On our short list at the moment are the RCV variants used in the jurisdictions mentioned in the Jurisdiction Sources section.

We have already formalized, implemented, and verified election schemes used outside of the U.S.A., such as PR-STV in Ireland, the list-based scheme of The Netherlands, and the Parliamentary scheme used in Denmark, in other repositories.

Within our Coq formalization we intend to demonstrate the functional correctness of our system against appropriate standard social choice properties, such as the Condorcet property, the later-no-harm property, etc. We are also interested in formalizing enough game theory to tackle questions about voting tactics, such as the resistence of various schemes to specific tactical voting techniques.

The project will also support the development of new ways of auditing RCV elections. That work is located in another repository as well.

Please contact us for more details about any of these other projects or if you have an interest in our supporting a new election scheme.

Build Status

The build status of the original GitHub repository from which our Coq specification comes is located here: Build Status

A note about the build status: it is not currently completely continuous, and an improper commit might cause it to fall behind. It is only correct if the extracted implementation is as new as the Coq implementation. We are still considering fixes to this problem.

Contents

Jurisdiction Sources

This section contains links to statutes and other sources that describe the RCV rules in each jurisdiction we are interested in.

  • Berkeley, CA, Municipal Codes. See Charter, Article III, Sec. 5.12, "Use of instant runoff voting in lieu of runoff elections"; and Municipal Code, Title 2, Chapter 2.14, "Elections -- Instant Runoff Voting."
  • Cambridge, MA
    • TODO
  • Minneapolis, MN, Code of Ordinances. See Charter, Article III, Sec. 3.1; and Code of Ordinances, Title 8.5, Chapter 167, "Municipal Elections: Rules of Conduct."
  • Oakland, CA, Charter. See Article XI, Sec. 1105, "Ranked Choice Voting."
  • Portland, ME
    • TODO
  • San Francisco, CA, Charter. See Article XIII, Sec. 13.102, "Instant Runoff Elections."
  • San Leandro, CA
    • TODO
  • Saint Paul, MN
    • TODO

License

The project is licensed under a BSD 3-Clause license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Contributors

  • Rob Dockins
  • Joey Dodds
  • Chris Jerdonek
  • Joseph Kiniry
  • Dan Zimmerman

Bibliography

TODO

About

The Free & Fair Tabulator tallies digital Cast Vote Records, specified in an open JSON-based format, into an election result. The Tabulator is formally specified in BON and Coq, and is implemented via extraction to Haskell from Coq and in SPARK.

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