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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I previously reported that "transparency" was key word for people’s positive response to our our recent DC demonstration of our digital voter registration system (DVRS). There is also a similar transparency issue with voting systems, and voting systems also have another transparency issue around paper ballots; and then there is the issue of open source. Here’s the how the 3-way connection works.

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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 2009 U.S.
Presidential election is now underway, with early voting having started in many
states. And pretty much right off the bat, we’re seeing problems with
reliability and reluctance. The story in New Jersey
is a familiar one writ large, but the contrast with Texas
and Florida
shows that often the same concerns– reliability and trust — lead to similar
reluctance about both using e-voting technology, and about avoiding it. The
kicker is the reluctance to avoid it, in Florida
– read on.

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I have a couple of updates on OSDV’s participation at next
week’s Personal Democracy Forum ( PdF2008 ). As mentioned earlier, Greg
Miller and John Sebes will be hosting a table in the Idea Market–now with the new
and improved title “How to Trust Voting Technology.” In addition, PdF organizers have

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My colleagues Greg Miller and John Sebes will be participating in the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum (PdF2008) in New York City, June 23-24. Specifically, they will be hosting a presentation table in the Idea Market on the topic of "How to Trust the Vote."

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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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Nearly unbelievable, but perhaps predictable. The Brad Blog reports on a warning letter that Dr. Ed Felten, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University has received from Sequoia Voting Systems, should he and a colleague (Andrew Appel) proceed to analyze the Company’s AVC Advantage product.

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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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Today’s "The World" broadcast of Public Radio International had a couple of nifty quotes I wanted to share:

"The paper trail is not helpful if the software is not doing what what it should."

"For any electronic voting system to be successful, the voters have to trust the voting machines. In the U.S., that trust simply does not exist."

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