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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New York state recently certified two voting systems, and the end of the process is an interesting insight into current certification and standards — particularly the view of the dissent-voting participant, Bo Lipari, who explained his vote in his blog My Vote on NY Voting Machine Certification. It’s certainly worth reading Bo’s complete rationale, but [...]

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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 [...]

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Sequoia Voting Systems announced today that they will be moving towards a disclosed-source model in which they will soon begin publishing their source code.
I must say that the tone and language of the press release is gratifying, especially that they thought to say that the product is also open-data, which is critical for the goal [...]

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We now have a federally certified voting system product that has completed the required testing by a federally certified independent test lab. That’s a milestone in itself, as is the public disclosure of some of the results of testing process. Thanks to that disclosure, though, we now know that the test lab did practically zero [...]

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Another in our series of real life stories … how it actually works for real election officials to test a new voting system that they might be adopting for use in the state.
The backplot is that New York State has been unwilling to give up its admittedly no-longer-legal*  lever machines, until the the state Board [...]

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In a couple of prior posts, I explained the “gold copy” or “trusted build” concept, and the role of EAC, NIST, and test labs. I can’t seem to completely bury this tale, because it raised another question about the processing of checking a voting system to see if it is legit: “Why is this checking [...]

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I recently commented on specific connection, in the case of the TrustTheVote project, of open source methods and the issue of identifying a “gold build” of a certified voting system. As a reminder to more recent readers, most states have laws that require election officials to use only those specific voting system products that were [...]

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Scanning the news last week, I found rumors of Premier Systems (the voting system vendor formerly known ad Diebold) going open-source, and of the Federal government pondering cases where voting system test results should be confidential. An interesting juxtaposition!
The first item I call a rumor not because I disbelieve the blogger in question, but because [...]

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There’s a fascinating nugget inside of a fine legal story unfolding in Arizona. I know that not all our readers are thrilled by news of court cases related to election law and election technology, so I’ll summarize the legal story in brief, and then get to the nugget. The Arizona Court of Appeals has [...]

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