Ballot Browser is open source ballot counting software developed initially for the Humboldt County (California) Election Transparency Project. In November 2008, counting performed with Ballot Browser revealed a bug in Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold Election Systems) GEMS tabulation software. Subsequent investigation by the California Secretary of State led to the decertification of the GEMS version used in Humboldt County.
Ballot Browser was developed by Mitch Trachtenberg and was available, free, from http://www.tevsystems.com.
Source code As of April 2024 while the domain tevsystems.com is still maintained, there appear to be no IP addresses associated with the domain so the site is unreachable. As of April 2024 the software itself remains available from SourceForge via a cvs repository.Ballot Browser source code CVS repository check out instructions
The Wayback Machine shows that www.tevsystems.com was active until at least 9 August 2014.The Wayback Machine: www.tevsystems.com @ 9th August 2014 By the next poll on 18 December 2014, the site had been replaced by a banner message directing those interested in TEVS to email Mitch Trachtenberg.The Wayback Machine: www.tevsystems.com @ 18th December 2014
All three "Downloads" links on 9 August 2014 version of the page redirect to the TEVS code repository, which as of April 2024 still exists on the Google code archive, and records that it was created on the 21st March 2011.Google Code Archive: TEVS Project page. That page indicates that the project has been renamed to "TEVS":
Licensing While the Ballot Browser project pageBallot Browser project page on SourceForge declares the license as "GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)", the source code itself reports the license as "version 3 of the GNU General Public License." throughout, and includes the full text of version 3 of the GPL within the source file: HelpMessages.py.
References
Ballot Browser home page: http://www.tevsystems.com Mitch Trachtenberg's essay on developing Ballot Browser: https://web.archive.org/web/20090503233649/http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/ourvotes.html Article from Wired's "Threat Level" blog by Kim Zetter: https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/12/unique-transpar Secretary of State Debra Bowen's report to the Federal EAC on the Diebold problem: Google archive of http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/sos-humboldt-report-to-eac-03-02-09.pdf Mitch Trachtenberg's SourceForge profile page, which links to the Ballot Browser code repository: https://sourceforge.net/u/mtrachtenberg/profile/