Election Results Reporting – Assumptions About Standards and Converters

It’s time to finish — in two parts — the long-ish explanation of the assumptions behind our current “VoteStream” prototype stage of the TrustTheVote Project’s Election Result Reporting Platform (ENRS) project. As I said before, it is an exercise in validating some key assumptions, and discovering their limits. Previously, I’ve described our assumptions about election results data, and the software that can present it. Today, I’ll explain the 3rd of three basic assumptions, which in a nutshell is this:

• If the data has the characteristics that we assumed, and
• if the software (to present that data) is as feasible and useful as we assumed;
• then there is a method for getting the data from its source to the reporting software, and
• that method is practical for real-world elections organization, scalable, and feasible to be adopted widely.

So, where are we today? Well, as previous postings have described, we made a good start on validating the first 2 assumptions during the previous design phase. And since starting this prototype phase, we’ve improved the designs and put them into action. So far so good: the data is richer than we assumed; the software is actually significantly more flexible than before, and effectively presents the data. We’re pretty confident that our assumptions were valid on those two points.

But where did the 2012 election results data come from, and how did it get into the ENRS prototype? Invented elections, or small transcribed subsets of real results, were fine for design; but in this phase it needs to be real data, complete data, from real election officials, used in a regular and repeated way. That’s the kind of connection between data source and ENRS software that we’ve been assuming.

Having stated this third of three assumptions, the next point is about what we’re doing to prove that assumption, and assess it limits. That will be part two of two, of this last segment of my account of our assumptions and progress to date.

— EJS