From their press release, I’m unclear as to what exactly this means.  There is software to run the optical scan machines, there is software to run the DRE machines,  there is software to design the ballots, and software to tabulate the votes.  I’m assuming and hoping that all will be released.

Citizens should expect a host of computer experts who will be critical of the Sequoia software.  There is no computer code that is going to please everyone.  Here are some of my thoughts about what to look for in this move.

First, when citizens hear about so called security issues, they should be asking whether these are real issues, or if they are like some of the vulnerabilities indicated in the EVEREST report in Ohio.  One of the “security” issues identified there was based on someone pulling a memory card out of a tabulator at a polling place and manipulating it in the presence of voters and election judges, reinserting it, and then hoping that no one noticed that the number of people who voted didn’t match the number of ballots counted on the tabulator.  It is important that any security flaws identified be classified by their feasibility and by their potential impact.   Security experts will be doing a disservice to the process by hyping problems that really aren’t problems.

I’m very happy that the code is being released prior to certification.  One of the concerns that I have had with vote counting equipment is that flaws in the design can’t be changed without recertification.  That is costly, and generally isn’t going to be done by a company without a glaring need.  Instead, we are forced to work around those issues and test and audit to make sure they are addressed.  By allowing the public to see the logic in the software, these issues can be resolved early.

I believe one of the results of this will be for proponents of IRV to propose code that will allow the machines to accommodate that method of voting.  This will be one of the very positive steps as I believe IRV and similar methods of voting will be gaining momentum.

I’ll be interested in the specs put out on the new Sequoia Equipment.  Hopefully there are a number of statistical items that the new equipment can track.  Despite its overall deficiencies, the core goal of the book The Democracy Index is the aggregation of data.  This new software can hopefully help.  For example, I’d like to see an actual log of the error messages on the machine (which I believe is one of the data elements Gerken is looking for in her book).

In terms of ballot design, I’d hope that the new software will help jurisdictions meet some of the design guidelines set out by the Brennan Center.  Our ballot design software works well, but could be better.
If Sequoia is actually going to listen, and it appears they will, the publication of their source code prior to certification is going to turn their new equipment into the industry leader.

2  1  3

Therefore, the order of candidates in this two districts is

County Board District 9 Democrats

Quisenberry
Bennett
Alix  (not part of the drawing as he filed after 8am on October 26)

County Board District 1 Republicans

Holderfield
Doenitz
Maxwell

All other candidates appear in the order of their filing.  That order will be reflected on our website.

No doubt, some number of election officials in America will be in the same position as us.  Hopefully, they will add the e-mail address to their forms as well.  At the same time, experience tells us that some will be behind the curve or limited by statutes.  This is the type of practical move forward that is limited by the lack of communication between election officials.   Gerken points to this problem in the Democracy Index.  How it gets resolved is still an open question.

I’d also like to see legislation that protects the privacy of these e-mail addresses.  Campaigns no doubt would love to get ahold of them, but they should be merely for administrative purposes.  Hopefully, that becomes part of any enabling legislation.  For our office, we do not release phone numbers or email addresses.

As in any public policy initiative, the case needs to be made to the policy makers.  Unfortunately, they are often part of the problem as I noted earlier.   But each impediment to open source that I mentioned yesterday can be addressed and needs to be.

Second, there needs to be a broader initiative that includes more than a single unit of government.  The Champaign County Clerk’s office is unique in what we have done.  I could hardly expect our successes to be matched by individuals.  However, if more units of government were brought into a project, it will become doable.

Third, a coalition of governments needs to pick a project to begin working on.  One possibility is a project that would be smaller and less critical to establish a process to develop.  At the same time, governments need to identify those areas ripest for future development that are critical to their processes and which can enhance our services to citizens.

GOSCON is an organization that has been formed to begin the process of developing open source solutions for government.  I’ve wanted to go their conferences in the past, but our schedule for elections has gotten in the way.  This year their schedule meets up better with mine and I’m attending their conference in DC on November 5th.

It will be interesting to take the temperature of this movement and to see how their ideas can be of benefit to my office, the County, and maybe the state.  I’ll be writing about it when I return.

Start with the deep pockets of government.  Government can spend money like no one else and rarely feels the pain when they misspend it.  In fact, misspending money often just results in an influx of more money with the suggestion made that not enough was allocated the first time.  Across the country you can bet that most bad software buys are followed by another bad software buy.

Follow that up with fear.  A little fear in this area is a good idea, because it prompts prudence and hopefully foresight.  But when it paralyzes, it’s to the disadvantage of the public.  Open source solutions present an ongoing fear for governments.  Instead of making a single decision about a software vendor, you end up making a series of decisions over many years.

Passing the buck is a favorite past time of today’s government officials.  Buying prepackaged software is part of that culture and links to fear.  When organizations develop software in house, even within an intergovernmental collaborative environment, they can be expected to be answerable for the performance of that software.  Much less so with a vendor or consultant. Once that decision is made to grant a single company the responsibility to develop a software solution, the government body is largely off the hook.  They take victory laps if it works well, but when it doesn’t work well, they practice their well worn fingerpointing.

I’m from Illinois, so perhaps corruption is more on my mind than most.  Nevertheless, software and consulting contracts are a ripe area for white collar patronage.  With ambiguous standards to meet to get a contract, and further ambiguity in meeting the terms, it can be easy to steer contracts to preferred individuals.

Looking just within their own organization, few local governments will find the programming talent to meet all their needs.  The best open source solutions are probably beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy governments.  If you’re not one of them, a prepackaged solution looks pretty attractive.

As a corollary, open source puts at least some strain on the organization’s resources.  And it often comes at the top.  If you’re a manager of a government unit, that often means that you’ll be spending more time shepherding a solution for your organization than if you had farmed it out.  That time may be precious or that manager might be lazy.

There are plenty of impediments.  But there are answers to all of them.  On the financial side, governments are broke and need to find cheaper solutions.  Fear, buck passing, talent, and time demands are problems answered with dynamic programming groups that share responsibility.  The benefits are so great that we have to find a way to work past the impediments.

So it is with much in election reform.  It’s this climate that allows Rick Hasen to write of me “Don’t Modernize My Voting System” because I oppose a particular plan to do that.  Anyone who spent a week with me would know that I’m continually working to modernize.  For example, I was tracking voter turnout by time of the day six months before Heather Gerken suggests it in the Democracy Index.  Hasen doesn’t think that is any indication of my willingness to modernize.  There is only one litmus test for modernization.  It’s the Committee to Modernize.  Anything less is unacceptable.

Hasen and the Committee to Modernize will no doubt be disappointed with the halfhearted effort of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to modernize.  He has company, because Congressman Gregg Harper wasn’t particularly excited either.  Both sides ought to take a deep breath and adopt the modest changes necessary in HR 1719 to make it secure and safe.

HR 1719, as drafted, allows for currently registered voters to update their addresses on a secure website.  This is a modernization tool that I would welcome, as would many other election officials.  Implementing it for many jurisdictions would be a challenge within their current software packages.  In time, I have no doubt those could be worked out.

But there are plenty of concerns with HR 1719.  First, it’s less than apparent as to whether these updates would come with a mandate to verify information against driver’s license and social security databases.  It’s also unclear as to whether first time registrants would somehow be enabled to use the system.  Further, there is a mechanism within the law to have emails as a substitute for regular mail.  While this can provide some cost savings, its important that every address change be followed by a piece of regular mail to verify the legitimacy of the registration.  Finally, as drafted, the legislation appears to take out the confirmation process whereby election officials are able to remove voters from the registration rolls when attempts to send them regular mail fail and they do not vote in consecutive federal elections.

I’d be surprised if the drafter’s intent was to eliminate all regular mail and to eliminate the process to remove voters from the rolls.  If those issues can be eliminated, then the biggest barrier to this modernization is what to do about first time registrants, and what to do about registrants whose information cannot be verified.  These two issues can be resolved using the reforms enacted in states like Arizona and Kansas as a template.

As compared to the radical proposal put forward by the Committee to Modernize, the online registration updates as proposed in HR 1719 are proven and don’t change the “opt in” nature of our registration system.  It takes the best of what we have now, and improves it.  That’s what good election reform should be about.  Hopefully, both sides can get together and make this bill work.

http://www.champaigncountyclerk.com/elections/2010_primary_candidate_filings.html

Currently, government generally seeks IT solutions through vendors and consultants.  For example, the State Board of Elections has used Catalyst Consulting to design and implement our statewide voter registration file.  When Champaign County conducted a technology assessment in 2007, consultants recommended that the county move away from our custom applications and move instead toward “packaged software.”

I doubt that our consultants put a whole lot of study into open source solutions.  Rather, they looked at our own stand alone development abilities as they put together a strategy for Champaign County’s IT future.

If they had looked at open source, they would have found much that makes sense for government.

To begin, government is not in competition with anyone (or shouldn’t be).  Unlike the private sector, governments have no vested interest in denying cost effective solutions to others.  In fact, in many areas, government actually has an interest in intergovernmental cooperation.  For example, on a host of issues relating to property taxes, the data from Champaign County is valuable to other governments.  Additionally, the changes to that data made by other governments could be seamlessly provided to the County if the two organizations shared software.

Next, collaboration on software solutions can only lead to more productivity and efficiency.  This collaboration should be an ongoing process.  What often happens currently is that a few units of government identify a need and a vendor or consultant responds to that need.  The software developed hopefully meets that need at that time for those organizations.  However, we don’t live in a static environment.  Other needs arise, additional best practices are identified, and technologies change.  When circumstances change, packaged software solutions are often incapable of responding to them, either because of a lack of skill or finances or because companies want you to pay for a total upgrade rather than a modest change to your current system.

When you purchase a software solution, you’re taking a chance on whether the company you are working with is going to be around in a decade and whether they are still going to be able to meet your changing needs.  Open source eliminates this very real problem for local governments and replaces that problem with a dynamic process to improve every software solution by bringing the best in government together on an ongoing basis.

On the financial side, open source solutions will save money.  Even with a modest amount of collaboration, medium to large size governments will see savings.  The more who join in, the greater the savings.  For smaller units of government, it will be less about saving because many of them aren’t even looking for software solutions to some of the issues.  Instead, what it means is that these smaller units will be able to take advantage of efficiencies that were before only available to the largest units of government.

Additional millions in savings will be realized as hefty licensing fees go away.  Further, software vendors often force unnecessary yet expensive upgrades onto their clients with the very real threat that they’ll cease to service clients who don’t upgrade.  Governments pay for the upgrade and often pay for transitional training necessary to go to the next software version.

For citizens, open source solutions mean more responsiveness.   Currently, the needs and desires of the community are held hostage to the skills of a software vendor.  With open source, governments can go out and find the person with the necessary skills to implement what the community wants.  In fact, when governments fail, the citizens themselves can find the person.

Next week, I’ll write about the impediments that have prevented the benefits listed here from coming to fruition.

At this time, we have no proprietary software solutions in our office, except for the program that designs and counts our ballots and an add on for scanning, imaging, and OCRing  documents.  Our property tax program is designed and maintained by the County IT department and also serves the Treasurer’s office and the Supervisor of Assessments Office.  Our applications for voter registration, notaries, assumed business names, births, marriages and a variety of other items have been designed within our office.

There is no shortage of software vendors for government administration.  Many of the products are high quality, but my experience has been that most are overpriced and lack the flexibility that our organization desires.  We purchased a marriage license program in my first year as County Clerk that was serviceable, but doesn’t even come close to matching the efficiency of our current system.  I have examined a number of the voter registration programs that exist.  I saw only one that impressed me and its price tag was a million dollars, not including the ongoing maintenance and licensing costs.

We’ve developed a system in house that mirrors much of the best of what we’ve seen in other systems.  It’s paid for, no licensing fees, and it gives us additional flexibility and the ability to make modifications based on future needs.  We are currently making upgrades to the system thanks to a federal grant under the Election Administration Commission’s Data Collection Grant. While we will be compliant with the grant requirements by the end of the year, we anticipate continued development of our system until March of next year.  Because we develop using SQL Server for our data and Visual Studio for our front end, our software would not fall under the open source umbrella, but the benefits from the software are much like what you’d get in the open source environment.

Because our system is developed within our office, we can make modifications more quickly and at a lower cost than other systems.  As the federal government and states begin to look at more on line digital government solutions, the need to modify current software solutions will be even more important.

Going it alone, so to speak, is a challenge.  The dividends are substantial, but there is no doubt that it can be very time consuming in the short run.  It would be difficult to quantify the time I have put into software development, but it certainly is measured in the thousands of hours.  Few County Clerk Offices in the state or country have those types of resources available.

That’s the background that brings me to one of the more positive notes out of the Democracy Index (a book I’ve spent considerable time panning).  Gerken makes a call that is long overdue.  It is for open source solutions to government technology issues.

The preferred method for most governments to address their technology issues is to find a solution off the shelf or to pay a consultant to put together a solution or to do a hybrid of the two.  All are costly, and all are legendary for not delivering a product that is vibrant, dynamic and flexible.

Here in Champaign county we are seeing it in the criminal justice area.  We have paid millions for a software solution that already is showing its age and limitations.  We are having similar issues with our payroll system.

Both the criminal justice software and payroll software are functions that every county in America has to deal with.  It is incomprehensible to think that it couldn’t be done at a far lower cost (with likely better results) by collaboration among those counties in an open source environment.

Which brings us to open source software whereby the code for the program is available to all users and can be modified in a way that suits a particular organization.  Modifications to the original code are made available to all users.  There are no licensing fees and no impediments to developing the software to meet the changing needs of the organization.

My next posts will examine these questions.  What are the benefits to open source?  What are the factors that impede those solutions?  How do we make the way for open source solutions in the future?

I was struck by this line.

The Internal Revenue Service and state tax boards seem to know where to find us every year, yet the current voter registration system requires each of us to file a new registration form when we move or risk losing our vote.

Which was immediately contradicted by the results of this simple google search.  How about this headline.

IRS Seeks to Return $266 Million in Undeliverable Refunds And Economic Stimulus Payments to Taxpayers

The Internal Revenue Service is looking for taxpayers who are missing more than 279,000 economic stimulus checks totaling about $163 million and more than 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million that were returned by the U.S. Postal Service due to mailing address errors.

The proponents of modernization want you to believe that some computer program is going to magically eliminate problems in voter registration.  The exact opposite is true.  There will be more disenfranchisement and more chaos because a computer program is going to override the actions of voters.

There is little data provided by these proponents to support their view.  There is ample evidence of governments inability to handle the job that these proponents want to give them.