Election Verification

To run the vote counting scripts, you need to download this archive: 2004-verif.tar.gz.

Please note that you need make, wget, patch and python to run the verification.

We advise every member to download the verification software and to verify that his/her counted vote is indeed the vote he/she sent.

Running the verification

Here are the steps to obtain the results:

$ tar zxvf 2004-verif.tar.gz

$ cd 2004-verif

$ make

You may be unable to get the vote archives from http://mail.gnome.org/archives/vote/. Until this is sorted out, you can get both files here and here.

The results should be in results.txt. A list of errors will be generated at the top of the output. The final tallies will be at the bottom.

The verification software

With this verification software, you should get the same results that the one posted by the GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee. You may want to verify the validity of this software, so here are some hints to help you:

• look at registered-voters.txt: this file contains the list of voters. You can match it with the official list.
• look at vote-archives.diff: this file contains all the modifications that are made to the original vote archives to make the script work without any problem. The main modifications are due to UTF-8 problems or some misplaced characters. Some spams are also removed from the archives.
• look at vote-counter.py: this script does the counting. You can read its code if you want to search for serious bugs that may alter the results.