Open Source Technology Licensing…
We’ve been promising to respond to the chorus of concerns that we may drift from the standard GPL for our forthcoming elections and voting systems software platform and technology.  Finally, we can begin talking about it (mainly because I found a slice of time to do so, and not because of any [...]

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A couple of days the New York Times Editorial page commented on Voting Technology in an editorial titled “The Voters Will Pay”. Some bits that interested me (but you should read the whole thing):
“[snip...] If the deal is allowed to go through, it would make it harder for jurisdictions to bargain effectively on price [...]

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Tomorrow night starting at 4:30PM the San Francisco Voting Systems Task Force is holding a Public Hearing to intake testimony and public comment on its draft prospective recommendations topics.  [Disclosure: I am a member of this Task Force, appointed by the S.F. City & County Board of Supervisors.]
We encourage everyone who can make it to [...]

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The TrustTheVote Project issued its first formal “Call For Participation” (”CFP”) to its Stakeholder Community last evening, and five elections jurisdiction have already indicated interest.
The CFP is inviting collaboration from elections jurisdictions all over the country who need to determine how to comply with the mandates of the new federal MOVE Act — particularly the [...]

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We’ve been spending a good chunk of our time lately on generating ballots, and on the steps leading up to ballot generation. You might think that the lead-up would be simple — making lists of contests and candidates — but actually there is lots more to it. In fact, it’s been much more time consuming [...]

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Thanks again to David Jefferson for his post yesterday on the lessons for Internet voting of the Google/China news (NYT: In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity). To answer some follow-up questions, I’ll explain a bit about the term vote servers that David referred to.
Let’s start with a little background on Internet voting. Many [...]

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[My thanks to to election and tech expert David Jefferson for contributing this excellent, pithy, and though-provoking reflection on the day's top tech/policy news story. -- EJS]

Google recently announced in an important change of policy that it will stop censoring search results for queries coming from China.  That is interesting in its own right, but [...]

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I came across this article, “NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked.”. The money quote:
“The real question, however, remains unanswered – how could USB Flash drives that exhibit such a serious security hole be given one of the highest certificates for crypto devices? Even more importantly, perhaps – what is the value of a [...]

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Tim Bray is one of the main people behind XML so he has some serious cred in the world of building and deploying systems. So it with interest (and some palpable butterflies) that a recent missive of his: “Doing it Wrong”.
I don’t know how much of what he says is relevant to what we at [...]

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We’ve been putting together test cases and experimenting with techniques and actually developing code for actually scanning ballots – in other words, the ’simple’ problem of taking a digital and figuring out if it is ‘correctly’ filled out by a voter, and who got the  votes. Here is a progress report on this work so [...]

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