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CA Sec. of State Panel on Open Source Elections
goombah99 writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson is forming a panel to investigate using open source software in elections. Suggested Panel members include Security expert Bruce Perens and Python guru David Mertz who is associated with the sourceforge EVM2003 voting machine project. This is big since a favorable outcome could help fund prototypes of true open source election equipment and systems."
safe by design-- i.e., based on paper
Yes, because everybody knows that paper is a write-once, ready many system with built-in user authentication which cannot be hidden, destroyed, or otherwise tampered with.
terminals which print out an ink ballot
That's part of the push for open source voting systems - you have a hard copy for verification. There are much better ways than just having it print out who you voted for so that you can drop it in a box - for example, one method which I read about not only keeps a paper record (which the user never has to handle, but is there for recounts), but prints out a tracking number that the user can enter on the election board's website and verify that their vote is in the system and who it is listed as being for.
... in Siberia, where Putin killed a fish with a speargun. He later claimed it was killed by Ukrainian separatists.
If you are looking for the Open Voting Consortium website, it may be found at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
The basic idea that the OVC promotes is that of a computer-assisted voting station (or stations, to accomodate different kinds of voters who have physical impairments) that produces a paper ballot that *is* the official ballot and that can be read by both humans and computers.
This goes one step beyond verified voting. Verified voting has paper records that serve as audit trails but that are not themselves the official ballots. The OVC system goes one step further and makes the paper that the voter sees and approves the actual ballot.
There are a lot of complexities in voting systems; the OVC system avoids many of these difficulties because it is really a conservative application of computers to traditional methods.
In addition, the OVC system, because it produces a paper ballot, can have many different kinds of voting stations to accomodate the different physical needs of different voters.
The OVC wants voting software to be, at a minimum, open to inspection and testing by anyone.
Personally, I can conceive of some people who might come up with clever user interface mechanisms to help voters deal with ballots - and I personally don't think that those mechanism need to be part of the open voting systems. However, the core aspects of creating, handling, and counting ballots should not be wrapped in inpenetrable proprietary shrouds - every voter must know for a fact that his/her vote has been correctly recorded and correctly counted.
By-the-way - full disclosure time - I'm on the Board of Directors of the OVC.