So, we have a phrase we like to use around here borrowed from the legal academic world.  Used to describe an action or conduct in analyzing a nuance in tort negligence, is the phrase “frolic and detour.”  I am taking a bit of detour and frolicking in an increasingly noisy element of explaining the complexity [...]

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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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I have arrived in Munich, reached my hotel and actually caught a nap.  It was a sloppy slushy day here from what I can tell; about 30 degrees and some wet snow; but spring is around the corner.  On the flight over the Pole last evening (I’m a horrible plane sleeper) I worked on final [...]

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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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Wired’s Kim Zetter reported on our Hollywood Hill event, in an article titled “Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released.”  I got a few questions about that “First” part, and I thought I’d share a few personal thoughts about it.
First of all, there is certainly plenty of open source software that does election-related stuff, as [...]

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Ok, so rumors of my being radio silent for months due to my feeble attempts to restore my software development skills are greatly unbounded.  I’ve been crazy busy with outreach to States’ elections officials, as our design and specification work is driven by their domain expertise.   In the midst of that, I received a question/comment [...]

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There’s a fascinating nugget inside of a fine legal story unfolding in Arizona. I know that not all our readers are thrilled by news of court cases related to election law and election technology, so I’ll summarize the legal story in brief, and then get to the nugget. The Arizona Court of Appeals has [...]

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The OSDV team had a wonderful time in beautiful, but construction-heavy downtown Minneapolis, MN. The TrustTheVote Project was an active participant at the National Civic Summit. Spanning July 15th through the 17th, the two-day conference was free and open to the public.
The Summit asked participants, “How can we increase civic imagination and capacity to solve [...]

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Thanks to the Alert Reader that pointed me to http://change.org, the "Top Ten Issues" contest (winners to be presented in briefing to the new administration), and the issue about election technology reform at "Move The Country Towards Transparent Election Systems". (Check it out! You might want participate in the poll yourself.)

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