Abacus: Open source software for the Dutch Elections (WHY2025)

The Dutch Electoral Council builds its new software-to-be, with a small in-house team, open source and in public. We call her Abacus. In this talk we'll go in depth on the technical and management side of our project. We invite you to join and check out our work! Our talk contains actual code written in Rust. "The software used in elections is developed open source", according to the Dutch law on elections. As we are working on this software at the Dutch Electoral Council, we want to share our experience and invite you to check out our progress so far. We'll go into our development process and technical choices, show some of the cool contributions we received, some of our own code and show what happens when a small government organisation decides to take software development into its own hands. At the talk both the lead developer and teamlead are present, to be able to elaborate on the actual development and on the management of such a project. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/ALPRVC/