Greetings-
So, I’ve taken a couple of days to decompress after a marathon of preparation for the Hearing this past Monday held by the CA Secretary of State.  Unfortunately, Secretary Bowen could not attend and preside over this important hearing as she was a victim of the global weirding that is dumping snow in multiple feet [...]

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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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I’d like to thank Eric Rescorla for making an excellent and pithy point about the purpose of publishing images of  marked ballots.  But first, thanks (again) to Mitch Trachtenberg of the Humboldt Transparency Project for publishing a hand-picked set of ballot images that provide a great example of the difficult borderline cases of interpreting hard-marked [...]

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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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We’ve quite a bit lately about a topic that is central to election confidence. One way of asking the question (which we heard this week at the Pew Center’s “Make Voting Work” Voting in America summit) is:

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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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Believe it not, elections in the U.S. are outsourced to for-profit companies. That’s a statement I made when I spoke about election technology and election integrity at a DHS conference on technology and homeland security. I was asked what exactly I meant, and could give a specific example. I did, and explained the varying degrees of outsourcing. But I found an example in the recent election that is such a good example  that I can’t resist sharing it.

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As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the many
events of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d
pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the
election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products
that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s
potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my
claims.

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The state of Virginia
looks like a state-full of Election Day trouble spots, to many elections
experts and activists. I agree with one of the main concerns (long lines at the
polls) but I also wanted to share the beneficial flip side of the VA scene,
recalled to me by the eloquent words of colleague Doug Jones of University of Iowa.

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Just wanted to point readers to a good interview that Greg and I did today with Interviews Online … and a big thank you to Dave Witzel for inviting us.

FYI, here is a partial list of questions from the interview. (And if you find any of the answers comment worthy, feel free to comment here.)

How did you get started working on voting systems?

Why "open source"?

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