Kudos to Sequoia Voting Systems for making good on a promise to publish (”disclose”) new source code for a future release of their Frontier voting system.  We applaud their recognition of the importance of transparency in voting technology.  That is, after all the hallmark of our work and the mission of the Open Source Digital [...]

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I need to correct two mis-impressions about the TrustTheVote Project that were presented to me by couple of election reform advocates.

One advocate is in favor of an election method using paper ballots that are all counted by hand, and all counted by machine — the combination being one where each of the two counts is [...]

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In another of our Tales From Real Life series, I direct you to Luther Weeks’ account of a day as an absentee ballot moderator, which involves making judgements about whether absentee ballots should be counted, and when (and when not) to rely on the results of counting machines. Perhaps you didn’t know that this volunteer [...]

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I’m hearing lots of fascinating stuff at the NIST Common Data Format Workshop, but a couple of items really struck me this morning: the contrast between a presentation by a voting system vendor, and a developer of an open source balloting device prototype. Neither of them explicitly asked a very good question about central or [...]

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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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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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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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Last Friday was the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in Washington, DC., where so many of us remember him saying “I have a dream.” The anniversary caught me by surprise when I noted it in the news, and tugged at me all day: what could Dr. King’s words have to say about [...]

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In this week’s news we have a classic example of how transparency (a.k.a. “open government”) has enormous potential to defuse some thorny political issues that can rise to the highest heights of U.S. political news.  The news is about Karl Rove’s involvement in Bush-administration actions to dismiss some U.S. Attorneys, including David Iglesias.
A New York [...]

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That’s a catchy blog headline, I hope, or at least an important issue. But I’ve fooled you because while answering the question, I am going to discuss “audit” again. I wrote earlier that one kind of audit is performed by election officials to detect errors in voting machines, or to put it another way, to [...]

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