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Government Standards
A list of links to useful government standards for voting and elections, notably NIST documents.
The National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) publishes standards and specifications online. Some of the most essential for OSET's work are published as GitHub repos. These include:
- NIST Special Publication 1500-100: Election Results Reporting Common Data Format Specification, Revision 2.0. This repo includes the definitive JSON schema, NIST_V2_election_results_reporting.json. Note that Version 2 is a separate branch of the repo.
- NIST Special Publication 1500-102: Voter Records Interchange Common Data Format Specification, Version 1. This repo includes the definitive JSON schema, NIST_V0_voter_records_interchange.json.
- NIST Special Publication 1500-103: Cast Vote Records Common Data Format Specification, Version 1. This repo includes the definitive JSON schema, NIST_V0_cast_vote_records.json.
The NIST repos include Word, PDF, and HTML versions of the standards documents, as well as sample data, UML diagrams, and schemas in XML and (as noted) JSON formats.
Note that many of these repos list essential files that are too long to appear in the GitHub file listing page without being truncated. Since the file extension is often truncated, it can be difficult to tell the format of a specific file.
To see the full file name, including the extension, on the GitHub listing page, just hover your mouse over the file name, and a little "tooltip" should pop up with the complete name. This feature depends on your browser, but all of the majors support it (citation needed).
Also, NIST published a discussion of the Common Data Format (CDF) concept as it applies to elections in November 2021: An Introduction to the Common Data Format Project | NIST. This is an updated version of a document published originally in August 2020, also named An Introduction to the Common Data Format Project | NIST (first version)
To see the application of the NIST standards, sample data is helpful. The Jetsons election samples include NIST-compliant ballot data and cast votes, including these JSON files:
- An Election Data file (EDF) for an entire election definition
- Cast Vote Records (CVRs) for all cast votes in that election
Also, see the Jetsons Election Specification wiki page, and related Notes.