To date, I don’t choose to publish my own political views. But no matter whether you are liberal, conservative or one of the various mixtures of the two, you will agree that making sure that every vote counts is integral to a successful democracy. And making sure that every vote counts in many ways starts with counting the votes, a job we have entrusted to a select number of voting system manufacturers.
Computerized voting systems have not traditionally lived up to how well other information technology innovations have been able to impact traditionally non-computerized environments. The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 was supposed to help propel the initiative to computerize voting systems in a manner that is more accurate and introduce non-repudiation. The later is a key in building public trust with the solutions that are put into production at polling sites. In order to harden these systems and hopefully standardize, NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) was given the reigns of chairing the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC).
NIST has run with a number of initiatives at protecting privacy while mitigating fraud, reviewing existing systems (ie – penetration testing), facilitating design and ultimately developing standards that will be used in voting systems moving forward. For example, the Common Data Format workshop being held later this month outside of Washington DC. Overall, it’s good work that is hopefully laying the groundwork for future generations.
But what role is open source computing playing in all of this? Not as much as with many other industries. One reason for this is that implementing open source technology in voting systems didn’t seem to enter into the minds of many until disputed votes from machines that were clearly poorly designed began to surface. Another is that politics and most engineers simply don’t go together. But my interest was peaked and I started to framework what a solution might look like if I were to design one from the ground up. Before I went too far down that path I decided to check what was out there and to my surprise there are a few solutions open source projects ranging in various stages of maturity.
Of the few open source projects that I was able to find, the Open Voting Consortium seemed like one worthy of further investigation. It turns out that the consortium has developed an iso that can be burned to optical media and runs a well architected application that can print votes, along with a bar code that can be used to scan those votes to tally them up. The system has been given a trial run at LinuxWorld where it was able to stand up to a live trial with perfect results. And best of all, the boot disk can run on an Intel-based Mac. And best of all, those involved with the project understand both the technical and the political worlds! All of this led me to offer my support in any way I can.
So what can you do to help? Politics isn’t cheap. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has published steps outlining how voting systems are to be certified. The process (as it should be) is daunting and fairly expensive. To help fund the initiative the Open Voting Consortium has a dedicated funding page where you can contribute using PayPal. Additionally, per a discussion I had with them this weekend, you can contribute by getting involved in your local politics (especially in the Los Angeles area). To do so, contact the Consortium through their website. As a number of my readers might be apt to do, also consider contributing code or technical assistance. The modern democracy depends on the ability to count every vote and this is an organization that seems well run, with a vision and with enough involvement can help to further the cause of voting systems and open source all at the same time!
