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Positive developments in eVoting
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Wednesday, June 30 @ 14:07:43 EDT
Contributed by Lulu_of_the_Lotus-Ea
Governance
Lulu_of_the_Lotus-Ea writes "[On behalf of Laird Popkin]:
There have been two positive developments in the world of open source and open standards for eVoting.

"First, the CA Legeslature has been working on Assembly Concurrent Resolution No. 242--Relative to ballot tally software that "would request the Secretary of State to investigate and evaluate the use of open-source software in all electronic voting machines in California". It gets to the heart of why open source voting systems are appropriate:

"Since no component or aspect of open-source code is shielded from public viewing, and all members of the public have complete access to the source code for evaluation purposes, there is transparency and public oversight". Of course, they also mention vendor independence, improved security, etc., but those are general issues true for any application of open source software; the issue of transparency is particularly powerful (IMO) for voting systems.

Californian reader, in particular, are encouraged to write their Assembly members in support of this resolution, which will be voted on, in August, after the summer recess.

On a more technical side, David Mertz just published XML Matters: Practical XML data design and manipulation for voting systems that covers how the Open Voting Consortium is using XML for the Electronic Voting Machine project. He points out that

In many contexts, XML is something that you force on yourself because it seems like the way to go -- but in a few cases, the fit is absolutely perfect. In projects that intersect with standards, I think XML has a particularly strong case in its favor since so many interoperable parsers and binding libraries are available (many of which I have written about in this column). And in projects like EVM2003 where the self-documentation of data formats is important (and while data volume is moderate), XML fits like a glove.


And since the XML specification is public, there can be multiple interoperable implementations of all components of the voting system (ballot entry, tabulation, etc.) with obvious benefits for trustworthiness and efficiency."
 
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