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OpenCount is designed to assist with post-election audits of elections conducted using optical-scan paper ballots. It enables risk-limiting ballot-level audits, which are an innovative, efficient, and cost-effective way to provide transparency and check the accuracy of election results. OpenCount has been used to support the California Secretary of State's Post Election Risk-Limiting Audit Pilot Program. In our research, we have applied OpenCount to ballots cast in elections held in ten California counties.

OpenCount helps count a set of paper ballots that were cast in an election. If you provide scanned images of all of the paper ballots, the OpenCount software will you identify all votes on the ballots and counts and tallies the votes. OpenCount currently supports optical-scan ballots associated with Diebold (Premier), ES&S, Hart, and Sequoia ballot styles.

The OpenCount system was originally developed as part of research conducted by researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, including Kai Wang, Eric Kim, Nicholas Carlini, Theron Ji, Arel Cordero, Andrew Chang, George Yiu, Ivan Motyashov, Daniel Nguyen, Raji Srikantan, Alan Tsai, Keaton Mowery, David Wagner, and others. It was partially funded by the US National Science Foundation and by the TRUST center; we gratefully acknowledge their support. We also thank the California Secretary of State, election officials at Alameda, Leon, Madera, Marin, Merced, Napa, Orange, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Stanislaus, Ventura, and Yolo counties, and Clear Ballots for data and assistance.

OpenCount development is now managed by Joe Kiniry at Galois and Harri Hursti.

To try out the OpenCount software, see our Installation instructions, then follow our tutorial to learn how to use the software.