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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I got a great and deceptively simple question recently: what guidelines should be used for testing of voting machines?

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It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today’s devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?

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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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Interesting news: on 27 February, the New York State Board of Elections unanimously adopted a resolution that would provide for waiver of fees for certification testing of open source software. The official announcement says that the Board may elect to waive fees (that a vendor pays for examination of a voting system) if the vendor meets some specific conditions of proof that the system is open source.

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