We’ve been answering lots of questions about the OSDV Foundation’s role in the District of Columbia’s Pilot “digital vote-by-mail” project, including a recent post with a detailed account of the history leading up to the Pilot.  But there is one Q&A in particular that I want to share with a broader audience. It’s a two-part [...]

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Kudos to the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro for his article “D.C. launches test of open-source online voting” — fine coverage, but with a title that I disagree with in terminology only. I don’t view the D.C. pilot as “online voting” but rather as a test of an additional form of digital transport for return of [...]

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We’re pleased to echo the announcement by the District of Columbia’s Board of Election and Ethics (BOEE) that they will adopt TrustTheVote technology as part of a pilot project to support the delivery and return of overseas ballots. In Washington D.C.’s September primary election, open-source technology from the TrustTheVote Project will be used [...]

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(Part 2 of 2: What’s My Ballot?)
Today, I’m continuing on from a recent post, which compared my in-person voting experience with one method of Internet-based voting: return of marked ballots by fax or email. Next up is a similar comparison with another form of Internet-based voting: Internet voting from home using a PC’s Web browser.
Let’s [...]

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I just finished voting in CA’s primary — whew! 47 contests, 76 candidates total, and for on-paper voters, 4 sheets! But today, instead of hand-marking a ballot (my preference explained in an earlier posting), I used a DRE. This voting machine is part of the voting system that San Mateo County purchased from Hart Systems, [...]

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[Today I want to share some eloquent writing about the right to a secret ballot. Though Doug Jones' October 2008 remarks are about an issue that arose a couple years ago, his words remain extremely relevant, especially in the context of the current discussion of e-mail voting. The discussion with Doug started with an issue [...]

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I have to admit, I like paper ballots. But it wasn’t always that way. As a small child, I remember going into the voting booth with a parent, and watching them use those fine old lever machines. They were cool. The curtain made it seem like something both secret and important was happening. The little [...]

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I was very encouraged by recent election news from Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper: Reason for election machine glitch found, officials expect things to be OK for the primary. At first blush, it might seem like bad news:
All told, 89 of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections‘  1,200 machines powered [...]

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[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 [...]

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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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