I had been meaning to report on OSDV’s visit to the Golden Gate Ruby Convention, where Greg presented on the TrustTheVote project. But instead TTV developer Chad Wooley has already done a much better than I could do, reporting on GoGaRuCo in his blog. Thank you Chad!

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Continuing the story of accessible voting and the "we just build stuff" mantra of the TrustTheVote project, I have an example of a serious mis-understanding that can easily arise because of the jargon and procedural confusion I wrote about earlier.

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Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we’re building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion — so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don’t work elsewhere.

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Election transparency was the third lessons-learned topic from the RSA panel that I wrote about earlier.  As in the other two lessons learned, the Humboldt County Transparency Project is a great example, but here are two more, to show the small and the huge ends of the scale.

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Election audit was the second lessons-learned topic from the RSA panel that I wrote about earlier.  I illustrate with two examples.

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I spoke in a panel at the RSA Conference yesterday, on the topic of lessons learned in 2008 about voting technology. I thought I’d use this blog to share my remarks, but even though we each spoke for only 5 minutes before the question and answer period, I covered three areas of lessons learned; so I’ll cover them in separate blog posts on each topic of (1) Usability lessons (2) Audit lessons (3) Transparency lessons.

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I found a remarkably good, plain-English description of the insider threats of digital voting systems, and with an intriguing title: Computer Experts Warn of Sophisticated Dagdag Bawas with Automated Polls.

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The current voting system vendors recently released a paper on election technology and open source. As a pleasant surprise, it is a mixed bag, in that much of the report’s rhetoric is  asspecious as previously seen, but there are also signs of the vendors taking steps towards comprehending what the voting system market would be like, with open source digital voting technology.

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Well, I am sorry to say that I have to make an exception to my avoidance of casting voting system vendors in a bad light — in this case Premier Systems (formerly Diebold). I was rather proud of PS(fD) when they owned up to the "ballot dropping" software problem (paper ballots scanned and apparently counted, but the first few not actually counted, and no log record of the deletion) that was discovered in the post-election audit conducted in Humboldt County by registrar

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I’d like to set the record straight on Minnesota’s handling of their November 2008 close election for U.S. Senate. It’s not a debacle, it’s a miracle. And it’s no longer a recount, it’s a series of court cases.

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