[EM] Open Voting Consortium for e-voting?

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Anybody here heard of, or working with, the Open Voting Consortium?  I  
couldn't tell what tallying methods it is compatible with, or if  
they're only doing plurality.

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/

-- Ernie P.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=2&u=/cmp/20040402/ 
tc_cmp/18700340

Volunteer Group Demos Free Election Software

Thu Apr 1, 7:00 PM ET

W. David Gardner, TechWeb News

  The Open Voting Consortium, a group of volunteer engineers and  
programmers, reached a major milestone Thursday in demonstrating a  
version of its free election software in a Santa Clara County  
government office building in San Jose, Calif.

  Spurred on by the electronic ballot glitches of recent elections, the  
consortium's members envision the program running on "trailing edge"  
machines in polling places across the country. "The purpose is to set a  
number of standards for future voting systems," said David Mertz, the  
system's architectural adviser. "We want to set security standards. And  
the open source software will be open for inspections."

  The organization, which has volunteers across the country and from as  
far away as Sweden, wants to produce voting systems that will do away  
with problematic existing systems, many of which it regards as  
"fraudulent, proprietary, expensive, and unreliable." Mertz said such a  
system, if adopted nationwide, would require several million PCs. By  
targeting used computers--"trailing edge" machines--the cost would be  
cut dramatically.

  In the consortium's system, a voter approaches a touchscreen and fills  
out a form, which is promptly printed out as an official legal ballot.  
The voter can cast his vote or review choices before the ballot is  
printed out with the voter's choices checked off. The voter then places  
the ballot in a private envelope and places it in a ballot box.

  That approach is in sharp contrast to most of the electronic voting  
machines now in use. Most of today's voting machines use proprietary  
source code and machines--and leave no paper trail, making it difficult  
to audit counted votes. Money and funding are important issues.  
Although the Help America Vote Act of 2002 earmarked some $4 billion  
for voter modernization, there has been little progress on the issue to  
date.

  "We are not in favor of having a public process run by private  
companies that want to keep everything a secret," consortium president  
Alan Dechert, a Sacramento, Calif. software developer who founded the  
organization, said in a statement. "We advocate spending a small  
percentage of this money on a comprehensive scientific research and  
development project that will give us the best possible voting system."

  The group posts its software publicly at SourceForge.net, a posting  
place for much public and open source software. Some members have  
talked with companies about acquiring used commodity PCs--another  
measure that would keep prices low. While there was widespread interest  
in funding secure and accurate voting machines in the wake of the 2000  
election, very little funding has actually materialized.

  The most ambitious effort is the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology  
Project, which was established by the respective presidents of those  
universities "to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened  
the 2000 U. S. Presidential election." That project has received some  
funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the John S. and James L.  
Knight Foundation.

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