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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Posted in Voting System Technology on Sep 21st, 2009
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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Posted in Voting System Technology on Sep 18th, 2009
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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Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 11th, 2009
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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Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 31st, 2009
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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A recent New York Times editorial spoke in favor of changes to U.S. voter registration practices, citing a recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. From a technology perspective, those changes raise the question of impact to existing I.T. systems for voter registration, both those [...]
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Posted in Announcements on Jul 21st, 2009
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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Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 8th, 2009
In a previous post I described the Minnesota election process recipe and later described some room for improvement — well, now you can read it straight from MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, what he’d like to do to improve the recipe.
Those improvements are mainly in election process and practice. I’d like to [...]
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