Building the People’s Voting System

Category: Uncategorized

A first: election system vendors admits losing votes

Here is a first-ever admission: a real software bug in a real voting system can drop real votes, and has dropped votes. And perhaps has been doing so for years. I wrote earlier about the wrangle between the state of Ohio and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), in which some real vote dropping was blamed on anti-virus software (which wasn’t allowed to be in the machines in the first place!).

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No Guarantees: the Right to Vote

A recent New York Times editorial “The Right to Vote” explains how vote suppression is alive and well, with real
barriers created to prevent people from voting, sometimes unintentionally, and
sometime very much on partisan politics purpose. The most effective means are
attacks on voter’s eligibility, by abusing voter registration information. (That’s one reason for OSDV’s efforts to create technology

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Why Don’t the Votes Add Up?

A story from election integrity watchdog Mark L. provides yet another
example the stark contrast between current election systems vendors current
behavior and products, versus the kind of election transparency that’s needed
to inspire trust in election results.

At issue the requirement that election systems product should track
“undervotes” (the situation where a valid ballot contains no voter selection in
a contest or measure) and report on the undervote rate.

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Reflection on Independence Day

Yesterday, on July 4th, I took some time to reflect on nearly 400 years of elections in North America, in the hopes of having something meaningful to share in this blog, not about technology, but something fundamental. With little immediate success, I picked up a book, and re-read some email from a friend.

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