OpenSTV was started in in the Fall of 2002 by Jeff O'Neill, who needed an excuse to get away from the mountain of reading required by the first year of law school. The code was first released in October 2003 under the name pSTV. The "p" in pSTV stood for Python as the code was and is written entirely in the Python programing language. The name was changed from pSTV to OpenSTV in October 2006 to better reflect the nature of the software. Jeff started OpenSTV partly out of an academic interest and partly out of frustration for the lack of available tools for conducting STV elections.

OpenSTV is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. More information about OpenSTV can be found in the links on the sidebar.

Any support in improving OpenSTV would be greatly appreciated. The following types of people would be most useful:

• Python programmers to improve the user interface and add new voting rules.
• Technical writers to add content to this web site and improve the OpenSTV manual.
• Quality control people to verify existing implementations against other software and election results.
• Bug testers to ferret out any bugs that need to be fixed.

Questions and comments should be sent to the email list openstv at googlegroups.com.