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Open Source Voting Software Success
elhaf writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they had the software prepared and Saturday's event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science."
Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science
Of course not, however there is a lot of science involved in the process of mis-counting ballots... especially in a way that avoids the possibility of getting caught.
Those are valuable trade secrets worth protecting!
"[1] In case any techies want to see some code, here is the program for the voting counting program, written by Asheesh: http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ad/voting_thing.tar
Here is Jan's code (if you want to run it and have some trouble, let me know and I will help you with it) http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/test/straw.tar"
I love the name.
RTFA The user made their selection and a paper ballot printed out (with both a bar code, and a printed candidate name) - this was then placed in the balot box. When it became time to count, it was done in public, the candidate name was read, and then the ballot bar-code scanned, making the candidate tally increase on screen.
If this is the totality of the OVC system, I hate to say it, but it's not going to make it in the real world for quite some time. By failing to meet accessibility requirements, it's an instant non-starter in a real election. I'm also concerned that any vote tabulation software is required; shouldn't that be standardized code based on the ballot?
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain