DemoChoice Polls

DemoChoice

DemoChoice Downloads

DemoChoice is an open-source, cross-platform software package released under the GNU General Public License. I hope that this license arrangement will encourage development of more ranked-choice voting packages, and generally result in widespread use of this election method on the web. Please note that the license does not apply to the entire contents of the DemoChoice.org website or of other websites that use this software.

The software is written mostly in PHP. However, the main IRSA counting engine is in C++. It is optimized so that it performs well for large-scale polls (more than 100,000 votes). Also, it works well on a wide range of browsers, including text-only browsers like Lynx.

Use DemoChoice in your presentation or convention!

The best reason to download DemoChoice is to run it on a laptop for use in a presentation or at a convention table. Install xampp (a self-contained version of apache and php) on your USB memory stick or laptop, copy the DemoChoice files in a folder named "dc" to the xampp/htdocs folder, and run the control panel in the xampp folder (leave the window open). Then send your browser to http://localhost/dc and you should be in business. Of course, web server installations other than xampp can work too.

Create highly customized polls!
If you want to embed a DemoChoice ballot in a complex web page, create a new ballot style or counting method, or link a poll to your own database of voters, you can install DemoChoice on your own website.

Note: In most cases, it's easier to just create a poll here and link to it.

Jul 2008 IRSA Release
This contains the ballot, tally, and results scripts, and a few support and sample ballot files. It lacks a few features of the main DemoChoice site, such as pie charts. This version is very young and may contain bugs. In a version released in early May 2008, the code that adds a single ballot to a tally without a full recount was not even close to functional, but it was fixed in a late May release. The July release fixes a bug involving excluded candidates, adds comments to the code, and displays results as fractions of a vote rather than integral votes.

The 2008 release is not the most recent version and the counting rules are not the same as those presented here. Please contact the author if you are interested in the current version.
107k gzipped tar version

Windows version (216k zipped file with precompiled C++ engine)

NOTE: for best results, these should be downloaded with a browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox or Opera.
This release contains about 2 dozen files. The tar file can be expanded using the unix command

gzip -d IRSA-4jul08.tar.gz tar xvf IRSA-4jul08.tar

or most prepackaged compression programs. Put the DemoChoice files in your webspace and read the readme file to proceed from there.