24 hours ago I, along with some others, was actually considering asking for a refund.  We had come to the EAC, NIST, and FVAP co-hosted UOCAVA Remote Voting Systems 2 Day Workshop, expecting to feast on some fine discussions about the technical details and nuances of building remote voting systems for overseas voters that could [...]

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Last Friday was a busy day for the Federal Elections Assistance Commission.  They issued their Report to Congress on efforts to establish guidelines for remote voting systems.  And they closed their comment period at 4:00pm for the public to submit feedback on their draft Pilot Program Testing Requirements.
This is being driven by the MOVE Act [...]

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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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To give an idea of a some of the many aspects of ballot design that we’re working on, I have a couple ballot images for you, from Larry Norden’s keynote presentation at the EVT conference recently. The problem illustrated is that the first contest is spread across two columns, which looks like it might be [...]

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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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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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Some readers may sigh relief at the news that today’s post is the last (for a while at least!) in a series about the use of vote-count auditing methods to detect a situation in which an election result was garbled by the computers used to create them. Today, a little reality check on the use [...]

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Here are a couple interesting news tidbits to ponder today, showing the breadth and depth of openness to changes to current U.S. voting methods.
First, some news from the EAC, the part of the Federal government that runs the program for Federal certification of voting systems — certification that in many states is effectively a pre-requesite [...]

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