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’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 is [...]

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I came across an interesting article in Network World, “Open Source: How e-voting should be done”, by Paul Venezia of InfoWorld. It’s a good survey and review of some of the arguments in favor of Open Source in the management, conducting and tallying of elections, so I recommend reading it.
A couple of thoughts. Paul says:
“Another [...]

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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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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked for public comment on the use of the Internet for election-related activities (among other digital democracy related matters).  They recently published the responses, including those from OSDV.  I’ll let Greg highlight the particularly public-policy-related questions and answers, but I wanted to highlight some aspects of our response that differ [...]

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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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Thanks to erstwhile election texpert Dan Wallach for bring attention to the burglary of an early voting center in Houston, and to the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Moran for coverage of the story including good quotes from Dan! But I have to add that in addition to theft of computers containing voter records, there were also [...]

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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 [...]

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