Reply #14: Open, Accurate Electronic Voting? It Can Be Done [View All]

[livvy]

(An older article, but interesting)

Open, Accurate Electronic Voting? It Can Be Done.

By Alan Dechert, AlterNet. Posted February 10, 2008.

A Democratic Party election using open-source software proves that honest, verifiable electronic elections are possible.

They said it couldn't be done. That it was impossible to hold an election on electronic voting machines that was open, accountable and accurate. But that was exactly what happened in San Luis Obisbo County, California, where the local Democratic Party held party elections in January using open-source software, meaning there was nothing secret inside the voting machines.

Here's how it happened. The non-profit Open Voting Consortium wanted to avoid the potential threat to honest, verifiable elections that is possible when proprietary, secret software and hardware is used. So it developed a simple, tamper-proof, auditable voting system, using only a PC, a mouse, paper ballot -- and open-source software, which is publicly available software that anyone can get, use or download to check for defects.

The Consortium's volunteers developed the software for the PC based Ubuntu (or Linux) operating system. Ubuntu is free and open-source and, most importantly, is publicly available. On January 12th of this year the software was successfully used in connection with an election.

A mixture of senior citizens and college students cast their votes on printed, bar-coded ballots that were deposited in a carefully guarded voting box and counted as County Clerk-Recorder Julie Rodewald watched. Two hundred and four people signed-in to vote and when the polls closed and the ballot box opened, there were 204 ballots to be tallied. Media representatives from newspaper and television witnessed the entire process from voting to tabulating to public scrutiny of the results.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/democracy/77487/