Tomorrow night starting at 4:30PM the San Francisco Voting Systems Task Force is holding a Public Hearing to intake testimony and public comment on its draft prospective recommendations topics.  [Disclosure: I am a member of this Task Force, appointed by the S.F. City & County Board of Supervisors.]
We encourage everyone who can make it to [...]

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The TrustTheVote Project issued its first formal “Call For Participation” (”CFP”) to its Stakeholder Community last evening, and five elections jurisdiction have already indicated interest.
The CFP is inviting collaboration from elections jurisdictions all over the country who need to determine how to comply with the mandates of the new federal MOVE Act — particularly the [...]

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Gregory Miller of the OSDV Foundation will be provide testimony during State of California Hearings on Future of Elections Systems next Monday, February 8th.
CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen requested elections and voting systems experts from around the country to attend and testify, and answer questions about the current election administration landscape and how California [...]

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Tim Bray is one of the main people behind XML so he has some serious cred in the world of building and deploying systems. So it with interest (and some palpable butterflies) that a recent missive of his: “Doing it Wrong”.
I don’t know how much of what he says is relevant to what we at [...]

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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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This past week I was privileged to be invited to an engaging and very informative  event hosted by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project on Caltech’s Pasadena campus.  Turns out that L.A. County is in the early stages of figuring out “where to from here” for their next generation elections systems technology, and this event was [...]

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Maybe it’s the "sleeper" event of the post-election, pre-inauguration season in DC — the "Voting in America Summit" conference (sponsored by Make Voting Work, a project of The Pew Center on the States in partnership with the JEHT Foundation).

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A story from election integrity watchdog Mark L. provides yet another
example the stark contrast between current election systems vendors current
behavior and products, versus the kind of election transparency that’s needed
to inspire trust in election results.

At issue the requirement that election systems product should track
“undervotes” (the situation where a valid ballot contains no voter selection in
a contest or measure) and report on the undervote rate.

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The notable election systems snafu news items of the week is a virus infection of Windows-based election systems sold by Premier Systems (Diebold) and used in Florida’s Pinellas county.

As a cause for alarm, the incident is pretty low, in that the infection was by ordinary Windows OS viruses, which can cripple a Windows system in a generic way. That’s not the much-speculated "targeted malware" that acts to change election data in the cases where the virus gets a foothold on an actual voting system machine.

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Today’s news of e-voting malfunction underscores my previous point about complexity of voting systems. This time, about 4000 ballots went uncounted in North Carolina’s election this week.

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