Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 7th, 2009
Today I’m going to give a flavor of the pretzel logic that applies to the way ballots are counted in the U.S. An alternative title for this post might be “Welcome to the real world of Federal Democracy” because several states have their own different pretzel. You can have 2 marked ballots, each in a [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 30th, 2009
Here are a couple interesting news tidbits to ponder today, showing the breadth and depth of openness to changes to current U.S. voting methods.
First, some news from the EAC, the part of the Federal government that runs the program for Federal certification of voting systems — certification that in many states is effectively a pre-requesite [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 23rd, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 9th, 2009
Today’s posting landed in my lap in the form of a note from election tech colleague and Pitt researcher Collin Lynch, as part of a discussion about the role of the Federal government (specifically the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC) in “fostering innovation” in the market for voting systems, and ensuring a “healthy market”. Well, [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jun 19th, 2009
In several startups and projects, I’ve seen a curious tension between innovation and adoption — and nowhere more than TrustTheVote’s development of open election technology. Today’s specific example comes from a question I received recently from someone we met at GoGaRuCo: what are we doing about more fair voting counting algorithms, esp. approval voting, and [...]
Posted in Open Source on Apr 20th, 2009
The current voting system vendors recently released a paper on election technology and open source. As a pleasant surprise, it is a mixed bag, in that much of the report’s rhetoric is asspecious as previously seen, but there are also signs of the vendors taking steps towards comprehending what the voting system market would be like, with open source digital voting technology.
Posted in Uncategorized, Voting System Technology on Mar 12th, 2009
I got a great and deceptively simple question recently: what guidelines should be used for testing of voting machines?
Posted in Uncategorized, Voting System Technology on Mar 9th, 2009
It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today’s devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?
Posted in Voting System Technology on Dec 12th, 2008
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:
Posted in Open Source on Mar 3rd, 2008
Interesting news: on 27 February, the New York State Board of Elections unanimously adopted a resolution that would provide for waiver of fees for certification testing of open source software. The official announcement says that the Board may elect to waive fees (that a vendor pays for examination of a voting system) if the vendor meets some specific conditions of proof that the system is open source.
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