We’ve quite a bit lately about a topic that is central to election confidence. One way of asking the question (which we heard this week at the Pew Center’s “Make Voting Work” Voting in America summit) is:

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Maybe it’s the "sleeper" event of the post-election, pre-inauguration season in DC — the "Voting in America Summit" conference (sponsored by Make Voting Work, a project of The Pew Center on the States in partnership with the JEHT Foundation).

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Believe it not, elections in the U.S. are outsourced to for-profit companies. That’s a statement I made when I spoke about election technology and election integrity at a DHS conference on technology and homeland security. I was asked what exactly I meant, and could give a specific example. I did, and explained the varying degrees of outsourcing. But I found an example in the recent election that is such a good example  that I can’t resist sharing it.

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As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the many
events of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d
pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the
election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products
that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s
potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my
claims.

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The state of Virginia
looks like a state-full of Election Day trouble spots, to many elections
experts and activists. I agree with one of the main concerns (long lines at the
polls) but I also wanted to share the beneficial flip side of the VA scene,
recalled to me by the eloquent words of colleague Doug Jones of University of Iowa.

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Just wanted to point readers to a good interview that Greg and I did today with Interviews Online … and a big thank you to Dave Witzel for inviting us.

FYI, here is a partial list of questions from the interview. (And if you find any of the answers comment worthy, feel free to comment here.)

How did you get started working on voting systems?

Why "open source"?

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Just back from an excellent (5th) edition of the Freedom to Connect Conference.

I want to tell you about another event next week our CTO will be speaking at descibed below, but first I owe a quick comment about F2C, as the Producer graciously gave us the podium to speak about the OSDV Project, which led to 3 hours of excellent conversation at an evening reception.

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I’ll be speaking tomorrow, March 6th, at 7pm at this month’s meeting of the Cooltech Club. Information about the meeting is here. The title of the talk is: "Saving Democracy from Computers: Creating Trust in Next Gen Digital Voting." Given that over 50 of the club’s 300+ members usually attend, and are hard-nosed techie types, I’m expecting to have some good Q&A and report on how e-voting issues look to this little slice of Silicon Valley. Stay tuned!

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