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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Earlier this year, there was an important legal dispute in Germany, about whether electronic voting machines were legal for use in German government elections. The dispute was decided by the German Constitutional Court (similar to the U.S. Supreme Court), and the short answer was “no.” Now, we have available an official English translation of the [...]

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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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I recently commented on specific connection, in the case of the TrustTheVote project, of open source methods and the issue of identifying a “gold build” of a certified voting system. As a reminder to more recent readers, most states have laws that require election officials to use only those specific voting system products that were [...]

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Scanning the news last week, I found rumors of Premier Systems (the voting system vendor formerly known ad Diebold) going open-source, and of the Federal government pondering cases where voting system test results should be confidential. An interesting juxtaposition!
The first item I call a rumor not because I disbelieve the blogger in question, but because [...]

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A good question re-surfaced for us as we participated in the National Civic Summit recently. The issue was and remains about identifying a “gold build,” that is, when there is a particular system/version that is certified for use as a voting system, how should election officials know that the systems that they deployed are systems [...]

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Today’s news yielded another pair of oddly juxtaposed news items. Starting with news from the world’s largest democracy, India, where voting machine tampering is in the news, following a recent election in Orissa province.
Strange things have happened in many states including Orissa and a lot of complaints, allegations and cases have been lodged, observed the [...]

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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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Continuing the story of accessible voting and the "we just build stuff" mantra of the TrustTheVote project, I have an example of a serious mis-understanding that can easily arise because of the jargon and procedural confusion I wrote about earlier.

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Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we’re building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion — so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don’t work elsewhere.

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