Building the People’s Voting System

Author: John Sebes

Detours in Election Technology: The “Open” Factor and Mobility

In a recent posting, I recalled the old-fashioned traditional proprietary-IT-think of vendors leveraging their proprietary data for their customers, and contrasted that with election technology where the data is public. In the “open data” approach, you do not need to have integrated reporting features as part of a voting system or election management system. Instead, … Continued

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Bedrock 4: Into the Ballot Design Studio

Continuing our Bedrock election story (see parts one, two, and three if you need to catch up), we find the County of Bedrock Board of Elections staff, including design guru Dana Chisel, in the “ballot design studio,” a dusty back room of the BBoE. Chisels in hand, staffers ponder the blank slate, or rather sandstone, … Continued

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Bedrock 3: The Big Picture

At the end of our last visit to the fictional Town of Bedrock, we left Fred as he applied to run for mayor. Now we’ll continue the story, but with a focus on Bedrock itself, in order to continue building up a detailed, yet simplified, account of actual U.S. election practice. The focus is on … Continued

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Bedrock 2: Adventures at the Board of Elections

Today, we’ll continue our illustrative story of elections — and as in the first installment of the story, we’ll keep it simple with the setting in the Town of Bedrock. As we tune in, we find Fred Flintstone in downtown Bedrock at the offices of Cobblestone County’s Bedrock Board of Elections (BBoE). He’s checking up … Continued

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NYT Totally Spot-on for Value of Open Data

You’ll often find the term “open source” here, used to describe either the source code for software, or the license that allows you take that source code and use it. But “open data” is just as important. A recent New York Times article read almost like I would have said it, starting with “It’s not … Continued

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Voting System (De)certification – A Way Forward? (2 of 2)

Yesterday I wrote about the latest sign of the downward spiral of the broken market in which U.S. local election officials (LEOs) purchase product and support from vendors of proprietary voting system products, monolithic technology the result of years’ worth of accretion, and costing years and millions to test and certify for use — including … Continued

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Bedrock of Election Management

As I said in my recent MLK posting, I’m starting a series of blogs that should provide a concrete example of election management, at a small scale and (I hope) with some interest value.  But before I tell a story of election management, we need to first have a story of an election, and this … Continued

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