Revision $Id: README.txt,v 1.1 2007/05/08 20:29:51 pdowney Exp $

OVERVIEW

pSTV is a program for implementing the single transferable vote (STV).
STV is used for electing a group of people (e.g. council, committee,
legislature) and it provides for proportional representation of the
electorate.  The idea behind proportional representation is that the
demographics of the elected group should, at least roughly, match the
demographics of the electorate.  The beauty of STV is that there are
no reserved seats and the proportional representation arises
naturally.  For more information see
    http://www.fairvote.org/
    http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/

In an STV election, each voter simply ranks the candidates in order of
preference.  The rules for counting the votes with STV are more
complicated than winner-take-all elections.  The votes can be counted
by hand, but it is useful to have a computer program to speed up the
process.  There are several variations of STV, but most users should
use the default options.

INSTALLATION

For MS Windows, pSTV-install.exe is a self-extracting archive.  When
you execute it, it will create a folder with several files in it.  In
this folder double-click pSTV.exe to start the program.

For all other platforms, you first need to install Python and
wxPython.  Then unzip pSTV-x.x.zip and run pSTV.py.

Jeff O'Neill
jco8 at cornell.edu