Home » Nonprofits

Open Source, Open Data & Open Standards Voting Technology

Ranked #2,385 in Nonprofits, #466,292 overall

Isn't it time we all demand trustworthy voting technology?

The cornerstone of democracy is free and fair elections. In a digital age, the substance of that cornerstone is technology. However, America is losing trust in the voting machinery used to cast and count their ballots. There is a lack of transparency. There are inconsistencies and machines are unreliable. And so long as the cornerstone of our democracy is maintained as a black box by the private sector, shareholder interests will conflict and win out over the public interest. It is time we move away from black box voting and toward glass box voting. Its time we re-invent HOW America votes in a digital age and maintain that technology in an open and transparent manner in the public trust. Its time we all say, "I count!" and support those who wish to help us all trust the vote.

New Table of Contents

  1. Recent blog posts about voting technology
  2. Tweets on Topic
  3. Determining Citizens' Opinion on the Importance of Open Source Voting Technology
  4. A blog you should follow
  5. Items of interest on Amazon
  6. Sound off!
  7. Reader Feedback
  8. New Guestbook
  9. OSDV Primary Blog

Recent blog posts about voting technology

The news is nearly non-stop on the challenges of fixing our voting systems... systems that amount to "critical democracy infrastructure."
Electronic Voting is Coming to the Oscars!
Technology continues to control our lives and influence our motivations every day! Soon, the ease of electronic voting will permeate into the routine and methods of the Academy Awards, presenting academy members the ease of voting with an ?electronic ...
Kenya: Lure of e-Voting and the Shortfalls Ahead
Electronic voting is an evolving technology, with slow adoption globally. Notably, the benefits are clear. At the registration level, ICTs improve on authenticity, hence reducing cases of double listing, fraud and nonlinearity in registry contents.
E-voting in listed firms set to take off
... to provide and supervise an e-voting platform. It also asked these agencies to obtain a certificate from the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) directorate, an attached office of the department of information Technology.
Belgium to Feature a New Automated Voting by Smartmatic in 10-Year Contract
?We are thrilled to have been selected as the service and technology providers for the elections in Belgium, a pioneer nation regarding the use of electronic voting. Along with the Belgian authorities, we have been working very hard to develop and ...
Powered by Google

Determining Citizens' Opinion on the Importance of Open Source Voting Technology

A 1st in a Series of Polls

The TrustTheVote Project has been in the trenches collecting input for nearly 2 years from elections managers, government officials, technology experts, and public policy specialists. Now, the time has come to take this effort to the streets, so to speak, and ask the real stakeholders: citizens, like yourself, who rightfully demand that not only their registration to vote be correct, but that their ballots are correctly captured, and their votes accurately counted. So, the poll question, with a simple yes or no, is intended to gain a sense of voters' opinion on the importance of moving away from "black box" voting systems to "glass box" voting systems, where all underlying technology is completely open for inspection.

Loading poll. Please Wait...

A blog you should follow

Disclosure: I write for this blog as a contributor to the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.
Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Items of interest on Amazon

Michael Alvarez is one of the leading authorities on this topic. His book on Point, Click, and Vote is an important work to distinguish why voting through the Internet is problematic and not the best solution in moving towards trustworthy voting technology.

Yet there are many things we can do to restore trust in how we vote, and Alvarez's other book cataloged here on Electronic Elections (available at: http://bit.ly/IoyE ) discusses the promises and perils of digital voting technology. It is a nice treatment of the pros and cons of election automation.

Another book worth considering discusses the not-so-simple act of casting a ballot and the associated complexities with casting and counting. You can find it here: http://bit.ly/b6hs ...this is important as one thinks about the seemingly simple process of automating elections.
Loading

Sound off!

In fact, I believe that the free market experiment brought by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, which essentially was a full employment act for a small group of vendors who could afford to leverage that act to make millions selling machines and long term service contracts to support them, has failed. Our election systems are critical democracy infrastructure, and the blueprints and specifications for how they are built and function must be produced and maintained transparently and held in the public trust. And to do so compels open source methods and processes. open source alone is insufficient to properly address all of the nuanced challenges of trustworthy elections (e.g., social engineering), but it is an imperative start, IMHO. What do you think?

Is open source the way to trust voting technology?

Loading Fetching blurbs now... please stand by

Absolutely; we must move away from black box voting to glass box voting.

Open source is insufficient alone to solve the pressing problems of voting technology.

 

Reader Feedback

submit
Show All

New Guestbook

submit
Show All

OSDV Primary Blog

Commentary on voting technology from the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation
Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

by

osdv

I am a veteran technology executive, having spent roughly have my career in software development and the other half in marketing, business development... more »

Feeling creative? Create a Lens!

Related Tags