Honest Voting

The Open VotingConsortium (OVC) has been working with scientists and engineers around the world since 2001 to produce what its members consider a trustworthy open-source voting machine — on Tuesday, August 5th it will put its machine to the test with a mock election at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

Deborah Gage writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that the new machine costs about $400, one tenth of the cost of proprietary voting machines, even less if made in quantity. OVC co-founder Alan Dechert says this is possible because the machine is simply designed and based on free, open-source software. The code that runs the voting machine is based on the work of a former UC Berkeley student, Ka-Ping Yee. A slightly more in-depth precis of the system can be found here.

People who attend the conference will vote by scanning a bar code on their badges, then selecting a candidate from a computer screen. When they’re done, they will print their ballots, which will include their bar codes. A separate machine can scan the bar codes and read their votes back to them if they choose.

This still leaves some questions of security, anonymity, and vulnerability to be answered, of course.

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