A couple of weeks ago I presented at OSCON and during the conference had an opportunity to sit down with Mac Slocum, Managing Editor for the O’Reilly Radar.  We had about a half an hour conversation, for which we covered ~20 minutes of it on camera.  You can find it here if you want to [...]

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One of our Executive Directors, Gregory Miller, had the opportunity to attend the O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Conference this week in my home town of Portland, Oregon (his too, in fact).  Summer is in full swing here, although no major heat waves so far; we’ve been enjoying cool morning marine layer followed by a pleasant [...]

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Some of the feedback on my internet/email voting post can be summed up this way:
Is email voting really that bad? Sure, emailed ballots can be snooped, tampered, or diverted en route, but so can paper vote-by-mail ballots – yet we still use them. So what, specifically, is so much worse about emailed ballots?
First off, I [...]

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I have arrived in Munich, reached my hotel and actually caught a nap.  It was a sloppy slushy day here from what I can tell; about 30 degrees and some wet snow; but spring is around the corner.  On the flight over the Pole last evening (I’m a horrible plane sleeper) I worked on final [...]

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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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Today, the OSDV Foundation announced it will co-sponsor the 2010 UOCAVA Summit and serve as the Conference’s Technology Tract Co-Host for this important Overseas Vote Foundation premier event.  This fourth annual event will be held in Munich, Germany 17-19 March.
Summit 2010 will constructively address overseas and military voting issues and challenges that we face today.  [...]

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“Why, oh why?” you’re wondering (given our teaser title, that is).  Well, at first we were we also wondering why.   This all began about a month ago, and it’s a bit clearer now.  With some breathing room made possible by the holiday, I want to explain how the FCC and online elections could be even [...]

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Wired’s Kim Zetter reported on our Hollywood Hill event, in an article titled “Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released.”  I got a few questions about that “First” part, and I thought I’d share a few personal thoughts about it.
First of all, there is certainly plenty of open source software that does election-related stuff, as [...]

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The OSDV team had a wonderful time in beautiful, but construction-heavy downtown Minneapolis, MN. The TrustTheVote Project was an active participant at the National Civic Summit. Spanning July 15th through the 17th, the two-day conference was free and open to the public.
The Summit asked participants, “How can we increase civic imagination and capacity to solve [...]

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