How about DU e-voting machines?

[AmerDem]

What if a progressive group started a company making e-voting machines? Like in the case of Diebold the source code is proprietary and kept secret from everyone. These machines are cleverly marketed country wide until Diebold, Triad etc. are forced out of business. I wonder how long it would take before repuke hypocritical mouths started blabbing about the fix being in.

Of course I say this tongue and cheek but could you imagine if the shoe were on the other foot?

[helderheid]

1. One has

Not sure what their politics are but it's open source and has a paper trail:

http://openvotingconsortium.org/

[helderheid]

7. "about us"

You'll notice Kathy Dopp is associated with them - she is the one who crunched the Florida numbers (I know her personally - we're practically neighbors and have worked on keeping the machines out of Utah) and now runs www.uscountvotes.org:

About Us
The Open Voting Consortium has broad national and international participation. In addition, the following are our Directors so far.



Alan Dechert, President and CEO

Alan Dechert has been a software test engineer and application developer for the past 15 years. In 2001, with Dr. Henry Brady of UC Berkeley, he co-authored a voting modernization proposal for California. This proposal was designed as an in-depth study of the voting system, including development of reference open source voting software. In 2003, along with Dr. Douglas W. Jones (Univ of Iowa) and Dr. Arthur Keller (UC Santa Cruz), he founded the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). He currently serves as President and CEO of the OVC.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur Keller, Vice President and COO/CFO

Arthur Keller is a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Keller has taught computer science at Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of Texas (Austin), Helsinki University, University Blas Pascal (Cordoba, Argentina), as well as Stanford University. He is an expert in database systems and computer security. He is a successful entrepreneur having been involved with a number of startups. He also has experience with national media: For example, he was recently on the Lehrer News Hour talking about wireless security issues. Professor Keller serves as the OVC's Vice President, Chief of Operations and Chief Financial Officer.



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Doug Jones, Vice President and CTO

Douglas W. Jones has been a Professor of computer science at the University of Iowa since 1980. He has gained considerable expertise in the area of voting technology having served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems since 1994. He chaired the board from Fall 1999 to early 2003. This board, appointed by the Secretary of State, must examine and approve all voting machines before they can be offered for sale to county governments. His expertise in this area has put him in great demand since the election mess in 2000 - frequently quoted in the national media. Professor Jones serves as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Open Voting Consortium.



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Peter Maggs

Besides being a law professor (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and a member of the District of Columbia Bar with expertise in intellectual property law, Peter Maggs is a pioneer in computer interfaces for vision-impaired users. In the early 80s, he worked on speech interfaces for PCs and Apple Computers. He also oversaw the development of text to Braille software. He is helping the OVC to navigate the potential intellectual property minefields related to our open voting system development and deployment.



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Karl Auerbach

Karl Auerbach is Chief Technology Officer at InterWorking Labs (www.iwl.com). He was a senior researcher in the Advanced Internet Architecture group at Cisco Systems. Auerbach also founded two startups (Epilogue Technology and Empirical Tools) and was closely involved with several others. Auerbach has been working on Internet technology since the early 1970's. He has been a long-time member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In addition to his technical work, Auerbach has been an attorney in California since 1978. He is a member of the Intellectual Property Section of he California State Bar. He is the former North American publicly elected member of the Board of Directors of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Auerbach has been named as a Yuen Fellow of Law and Technology at the California Institute of Technology and Loyola of Los Angeles Law School. He has also received the Norbert Wiener Award from the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR).


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OVC FOUNDING MEMBERS
Jeff Almeida
Ed Cherlin
Troy Davis
Lori Dechert
Kathy Dopp
Lori Flynn, Ph.D.
Chris Gates
Matteo Giacomazzi
Rick Gideon
Jean-Paul Gignac, Developer
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Cory Hamma
Teresa Hommel
Kurt Hyde
Jan Kärrman, Developer
Bob Kibrick
Eron Lloyd, Developer
Fred McLain, Development Lead for prototype


David Mertz, Principal Member and Architectural Advisor

David Mertz, Ph.D. is a well-known author on programming--and sometimes political--topics. He feels that procedural democracy requires that the technical instruments of governance be open for public inspection, every bit as much as it requires the legal acts of government remain so open. David has written extensively about OVC's design principles


Lou Montulli
Anand Pillai, Developer
Laird Popkin, Web Master, Developer
Eric A. Smith
Charlie Strauss, Ph.D., Los Alamos Computer Scientist
Ellen Theisen
Arnold B. Urken, Ph.D.

[missouri dem 2]

13. This is great news. Thank you for posting this.

[AmerDem]

9. We need open source

and a whole new revamping of our voting system. From top to bottom we need to make our system honest, fool proof and political groups taken completely out of the picture.

[helderheid]

11. Openvotingconsortium

is open source. :)

[AmerDem]

12. yes I'm now aware

:thumbsup:

[sorechasm]

14. Real-time monitoring by internet / wireless?

I understand the history and struggle to have our votes private (the Boss isn't looking over our shoulder), but now it appears our votes are being hijacked by the very vehicle to keep them private. Can't we have both privacy and transparency, with a machine that sends each vote to a public tabulator by wireless that the entire nation can monitor on the internet? (You'd still have privacy as no names are associated with the tabulators anyway.) We could all monitor for spikes and anomalies immediately. Of course it would have to be a one-way signal (transmitter only, no receiver)... Pipe dream?

[AmerDem]

15. I have no idea but

as the 2004 presidential election was drawing near I watched a report out of India where they use an e-voting system. They quoted prices of thousands of dollars for each model voting machine rather then the millions we see here. They receive there results at once without a long drawn out process. They said there was a %90 plus approval rating of the system from voters. I think more could be looked at from India's system to restructure ours. It's pretty sad isn't it when the so called leader of the free world can't even have fair elections?

[CantGetFooledAgain]

22. I had the same thought

Distributed, public, real-time reporting, if done in a secure way, would virtually eliminate the possibility of fraud.

I know, that's a big "if". But I do take exception with the people who think technology automatically detracts from security. I personally think that technology could be applied to make voting MORE secure.

[newyawker99]

24. Hi sorechasm!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[OKthatsIT]

17. Have you folks heard of WISEKEY? from Switzerland

They do internet voting and they say its fowl proof..open source, encryption safe.

I heard MS was working with them, now.

[helderheid]

18. not me

Have't heard of it! Any links to info on it? Sounds great to me! Still, it's hard to imagine Internet Voting ever being hack proof

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. I can say...

That a very well-known(and very liberal) computer hardware engineer is working on the design of the machine hardware for such a thing right now.

If you were a hardcore computer weenie and I were to tell you his name, you would recognize it immediately.

The interesting thing is that he is doing this uncompensated. You see, he has two kids...

[mhr]

4. Steve Wozniak?

eom

[AmerDem]

10. throw out his name

I'm interested to know who it is.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

19. I wish I could...

But I have not been chopped to do so. Let's just say that he is not Woz, but definately a peer from the same era.

There are some "Bumbling Types" here who know exactly who I mean. ;-)

[AmerDem]

21. I detect clues

in your reply but it's still over my head.

[mhr]

3. I've Suggested This Several Times - No Interest So Far

There is a significant amount of apathy after the election - me thinks.

[helderheid]

6. have you checked this out yet?

It has an online demo - it's pretty cool!

http://openvotingconsortium.org/

[genieroze]

20. That's so cool. eom

[berniew1]

5. Analysts say a pattern is developing regarding Touchscreen results

One pattern that is developing based on the experience of voters in Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, and elsewhere(especially swing states) is the the machines appear to have been set with a default to Bush. Then if a voter successfully punched the ballot for another candidate, Bush was replaced by that candidate. But it appears that in many cases the voter did not successfully accomplish this and in some cases it was hard or impossible to get the other candidate to register. This was a major problem in Mahoning county in Ohio, and possibly Mercer, but also occurred in many counties and several states. They had to replace some of the machines in counties like Mahoning after repeated attempts by techs to "recalibrate" the machines after widespread reports of problems. This also happened in Florida and New Mexico. But this means that Bush would get not only the votes of those who didn't notice that the punched candidate didn't register but any intentional non votes or accidental non votes or unsuccessfully completed votes. Quite an advantage. As much as 2 to 4% in some areas and even more perhaps in some minority areas.

[GAspnes]

8. Source? (n/t)

[helderheid]

16. kick

because I think http://openvotingconsortium.org/ should be seen by every and all DUers (and their friends and family... and their congresspeople... and senators... and Michael Moore... and even Santa Claus)

[coreystone]

23. Paper Ballots, Manual Counting, NO MACHINES (PERIOD)!!....