Building the People’s Voting System

Tag: transparency

How to Trust a Voting Machine

[Today’s guest post is from election technology expert Doug Jones, who is now revealed as also being an encyclopedia of U.S. elections history. Doug’s remarks below were in a discussion about how to effectively use post-election ballot-count audits as a means to gain trust in the correct operation of voting machines — particularly timely, given … Continued

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OSDV Foundation Public License Draft Published for Review

Happy Friday– Apologies for the apparent radio-silence these past few weeks since returning from the Overseas Voting Summit in Munich.  We’ve been very busy: handling 2 elections jurisdiction proposals and another large voter outreach group’s request to adopt portions of our open source elections technology framework, with lots of related work effort. But today, at … Continued

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AR vs. UVR?

I came across an interesting article about voter registration: “The Alternative to Universal Voter Registration” where John N. Hall strongly supports Automatic Registration (AR) over Universal Voter Registration (UVR). To people who are not election experts the distinction is a bit subtle. UVR has states proactively try to register everyone to vote, while AR has … Continued

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Shelfware or Liveware?

I’d like to answer a fine question posed by Jered in a comment to a blog posted by my esteemed colleague Pito Salas. Jered allowed as how the basic idea of OSDV was a fine idea, but asked “What’s the plan to get OSDV-based systems deployed?” A great question, but where I differ with Jered … Continued

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Transparency: Government Offers Data to Mine

In the next step on the topic of voting machines and transparency, let me explain what I meant in a previous posting about a “side effect” of adoption of TTV technology for machine counts of optically scanned ballots. The ballot counting software, like pretty much all we make, logs the heck out of everything, and … Continued

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Transparency, Voting Machines, Choices

Today I provide the next step in clarifying TTV goals in relation to discussions with election transparency advocates. Regarding the previous posting, I want to emphasize that voting  machines — in this case we focus on paper ballot scanning machines — are a transparency problem, if there is no human involvement in counting paper ballots, … Continued

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Sequoia Makes Good on Publishing New Source Code

Kudos to Sequoia Voting Systems for making good on a promise to publish (“disclose”) new source code for a future release of their Frontier voting system.  We applaud their recognition of the importance of transparency in voting technology.  That is, after all the hallmark of our work and the mission of the Open Source Digital … Continued

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Transparency: Machines as Part of the Problem?

I need to correct two mis-impressions about the TrustTheVote Project that were presented to me by couple of election reform advocates. One advocate is in favor of an election method using paper ballots that are all counted by hand, and all counted by machine — the combination being one where each of the two counts … Continued

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Tales From Real Life: Judging Absentee Ballots

In another of our Tales From Real Life series, I direct you to Luther Weeks’ account of a day as an absentee ballot moderator, which involves making judgements about whether absentee ballots should be counted, and when (and when not) to rely on the results of counting machines. Perhaps you didn’t know that this volunteer … Continued

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