The OSDV Foundation was invited to host a panel session on the role of open source in elections and voting systems.  Here is a copy of Gregory’s presentation from that well attended session yesterday.

We were equally fortunate to have a couple of other opportunities to share our story and work: a gracious mention of us during Tim O’Reilly’s keynote by Bryan Sivak, the CTO of the District of Columbia, and a 20 minute interview with Gregory and O’Reilly Radar Managing Editor Mac Slocum.

In another post by Greg himself he’ll provide the questions and his answers (as best as he can recall) from that interview for those more interested in skimming the text rather than sitting through the video replay.

We appreciate Tim O’Reilly’s growing interest in our work to create publicly owned critical democracy infrastructure for elections administration and voting.  And we thank him for the opportunity to participate.

-Matt
Director, Communications & Outreach

1. Where do the OSDV Foundation and TrustTheVote Project stand on Internet voting?
2. How does this square with OSDV’s role in the D.C. Pilot?

To complement Greg’s recent post , I’ve provided what I hope is a crisp, yet complete, answer in the form of a pointed list of positions, which apply very specifically to the use of technology in U.S. elections.

On Internet Voting

• We do not support Internet voting for everyone – such all-electronic elections lack the ease of independent verification that is the strength of the method of op-scan counted paper ballots coupled with mandatory auditing.
• We do not support any of the types of Internet voting used in other countries – there is no voter-approved ballot document when the ballot itself is HTML and HTTP data exchanged by a Web browser and an i-voting server.
• We do not support any usage of email for transporting marked ballots – email is fundamentally and easily vulnerable to mischief en route from the voter to the BOE.
• These on-line methods of voting and ballot transport all have significant risks to ballot integrity, inherent in the use of the Internet.
• These on-line methods have significant risk to the “secret ballot” by making either ballots or votes attributable to specific voters.
• These on-line methods are not a form of “verified voting” where the ballot marked by the voter is the ballot that is counted.
• We fully support verified voting methods for domestic polling place voting.
• We fully support existing election practices of paper vote-by-mail.
• Our core mission is and will remain the creation of open transparent technology to support the existing election practices.
• We support existing UOCAVA voter-support methods including digital distribution of blank ballots, and express delivery (e.g., surface courier or mails) of marked paper ballots from the voter to their respective BOE.
• We believe that there may be a need for digital ballot return by those UOCAVA voters who lack timely access to rapid and reliable means of paper ballot return, and who have recently used email for digital ballot return.
• We believe that it is worth considering whether those UOCAVA voters should demonstrate a need for digital return because of that lack of timely access.

About the D.C. Pilot

• We are supporting D.C.’s Pilot effort to investigate the need for and feasibility of a Web-based alternative with significantly less risk to the “secret ballot.”
• We believe that the Pilot’s method does not make Internet voting completely safe or secure for general use.
• We believe that the Pilot’s method does not make Internet voting completely safe or secure for UOCAVA voters.
• We believe that the Pilot’s method does address some security issues of current email voting, but does not attempt to address all security issues of email voting, or all security issues of Internet usage.
• We believe that the Pilot project will create a publicly documented worked example that can be used for concrete evaluation of the Internet risks and ballot-secrecy benefits; an evaluation that should be part of consideration of whether or not any form of digital VBM methods are appropriate for continued use for UOCAVA voters.
• We believe that the worked-example benefit will be strongly supported by the Pilot project’s pre-election public review period for anyone to try the system, to examine, probe, and assess not only the technology but also its deployment and usage.
• We believe that the worked-example benefit will be strongly supported by a public post-election out-brief.
• We believe that the transparency of the Pilot will be strongly supported by system’s software being available for use independent of the DC pilot, including, but not limited to, the existing TrustTheVote Project software for election administration and ballot design, which is one of our key contributions to the project.
• We believe that much of the digital ballot technology can be dual use, applying to both UOCAVA vote-by-mail and overseas kiosk-based voting.

These statements are specific to U.S. election practices and laws, especially about U.S. military and overseas voters. We certainly respect that other countries have different needs, practices, and capabilities, and in general, a very different election landscape than in the U.S., with its 50+ different state election codes, thousands of election administration jurisdictions, dozens of electoral districts for each individual voter, and a significant portion of the electorate that must vote remotely.

Lastly, an important caveat: these are positions, opinions, and beliefs only of the OSDV Foundation; we do not advocate on behalf of any other organization; as a non-profit public benefits corporation we cannot directly lobby any public agency or institution for any policy or regulatory change. That stated, we certainly can and will continue to opine here and elsewhere, but as always our focus is on the application of technology in the administering of public elections.

– EJS

[Note: this is a much longer post than I would prefer, but the content is very important to explain a recent announcement and our role.]

I’ve waited to launch a discussion in this forum in order to let the flurry of commentaries calm on the news.  Now we need to take the opportunity to speak in own voice, rather than the viewpoint of  journalists and press releases, and provide insight and reality-checks from the authoritative source about what we’re up to: Us. For those of you who have not read any of this news, here is a sample or two.  The news is about the District of Columbia is implementing a Pilot program to digitally deliver ballot to a group of qualified overseas voters, and accept digitally returned ballots from them.  (Actually, D.C. already has accepted digitally returned ballots via Fax and eMail.)  So, the headline might be:

“District of Columbia to Launch Pilot Program to benefit Overseas & Military Voters with Digital Distance Balloting Solution Using Open Source Software from Non-Profit Voting Technology Group.”

I believe that is as simple and factual as it gets, and IMHO a fair headline.  However, here are two alternative headlines, depending on your view, interests, or issues:

1. “Open Source Voting Project Succeeds in Production Deployment of New Transparent and Freely Available Elections Technology.”
   -or-
2. “OSDV Foundation Advances Misguided Cause of Internet Voting, Despite Well Settled Dangers, Putting Election Integrity at Risk.”

If you follow our work or have read our statement on these topics before, then you recognize the headline #1 is where our interests and intentions are focused. Over the past two weeks, though, we’ve received plenty of feedback that some believe that headline #2 is the real and unfortunate news, undermining the efforts of those who tirelessly work for elections integrity. Well, that is not what we intended to do. But we do need to do a better job at communicating our goals, as the facts unfold about the project. So, let me back up a bit and start  an explanation of what we are really doing and what are real intentions are.

But first let me make the following statement, repeating for the record our position on Internet voting:

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation does not advocate the general use of the public Internet for the transaction of voting data.  The technical team of the TrustTheVote Project strongly cautions that no Internet-based system for casting, let alone counting, of ballots can be completely secure, nor can a voter’s privacy be ensured, or the secrecy of their ballot protected.

We do not recommend replacing current voting systems by adopting Internet Voting systems. However, we think that there may be a use case in which Internet-based ballot return may be the only course of last resort for rapid delivery of a ballot in time to be counted. That case is the very limited situation of an overseas or military voter who believes that they may be disenfranchised unless they rely on a digital means to return their marked ballot, because physical means are not timely or not available. That is the situation that we genuinely believe is being restrictively addressed in the D.C. Pilot project that we are participating.

And to be crystal clear: OSDV’s role is supplying technology.  The District’s Board of Elections and Ethics is running the show, along withe the District’s I.T. organization. But why did we chose this role? The success of the TrustTheVote Project is predicated on accomplishing three steps to delivering publicly owned audit-ready, transparent voting technology:

1. Design;
2. Development; and
3. Deployment.

Design.  We are employing a public process that engages a stakeholder community comprised of elections officials and experts.  We cannot design on our own and expect what we come up with will be what will work.  It is, and must be, a framework of technology components in order to be adoptable and adaptable to each jurisdiction that chooses to freely acquire and deploy the Project’s work. None of the TV Framework specifically addresses any transport means of ballot data.   The Framework voting systems architecture includes accessible ballot marking (”ABM”) devices, optical scanners for paper ballot marked by hand or ABM, and tabulators.  The Framework elections management services architecture includes EMS components, poll books, and ballot design studio.

Development.  We are employing an open source method and process, somewhat modified and similar in structure to how the Mozilla Foundation manages development of their open source software – with a core team that ensures development continuity and leadership, complemented by a team of paid and volunteer contributors.  And the development has to be open, to go along with the open design process, and open testing, delivering on the commitment to building election technology that anyone can see, touch, and try.  We’re developing for the four legs of integrity: accuracy, transparency, trust, and security.

Deployment. But “open source” at the Foundation is also about distribution for deployment.  As we’ve said before, the  OSDV Public License, based on our “cousin’s” license, the Mozilla Public License, meets the special needs of government licensee.  And in so doing we avail the source code, and where required, resources (in exchange for a development grant to the Foundation) to make the necessary refinements and modifications to enable the adopting jurisdiction to actually deploy this open source technology.  The deployment will generally be managed by a new type of commercial player in the elections technology sector: the systems integrator who will provide qualified commodity hardware, with the Project’s software, and the services to stand it up and integrate it with other jurisdiction’s IT infrastructure where required.

Motivation
One critic has asked, “Why would you agree to support any project that uses the Internet in elections or voting?”  Our motivation for working with the District of Columbia is all about the third “D” – Deployment.   All of our efforts are merely academic, unless stakeholders who have contributed to the specifications actually adopt the resulting open source technology as an alternative to buying more proprietary elections technology, when the opportunity arises to replace or enhance their current solutions.

Now, what about that “Internet” element?

The District of Columbia Board of Elections & Ethics (B.O.E.E) was in search of a solution to enhance their compliance with the MOVE Act.  Of course, people in many election jurisdictions were asking:

If I can deliver the blank ballot and reduce the cycle time for qualified overseas voters, then why shouldn’t we go all the way and facilitate digital return of the marked ballot?

Well, there’s a host of reasons why one shouldn’t do that.  For one quick example: our valued strategic technology partner collaborating with us on data standards, the Overseas Vote Foundation, not only offers digital blank ballot delivery, but  also have renewed their courier services through the assistance of the US Postal Service and FedEx to ensure that the Military voters’ marked ballots can, in fact, make it back in time.   But on the other hand, there is an unfortunate reality that once the digital path is open, OVF, US Mails, or FedEx notwithstanding, jurisdictions will explore leveraging the Net; its happening already in several locations.  That does not make it right or preferable, but it does make it a reality that we need to address.

So, the District at least – at our encouragement dating back to March in Munich – heard our encouragement to explore options, but they did have some requirements.

Specifically, they wanted to conduct a Pilot of a solution that might be a better alternative to accepting returned marked ballots as eMail attachments or Faxed marked ballots exclusively for their overseas and military voters.  And particularly unique to their requirements was – to our delight – a fully transparent open source software solution with unbridled ownership of the resulting source code for all elements of the Pilot solution.  That, of course, is in complete harmony with our charter and mission.

Again, for those readers who know us, and understand our motivations and position on the Internet issue, you can understand our acute focus on the opportunity to deploy open source elections administration software in a real election setting. In the after-glow of this real possibility, and drilling into the details of how the ballot design studio could work for this, we realized we needed to get back to grappling with this digital ballot return detail of the Pilot project.

Initially, we were definitely concerned about how to approach this aspect of the Pilot, since we’ve been clear about our position on the use of the Internet.  But to be frank, with the prospect that the District could simply turn to commercial proprietary Internet voting systems vendors, we felt we had to help find an alternative open source approach for the limited purpose of this Pilot. We encouraged the B.O.E.E. to find an alternative means to digitally return the ballot, but neither by deploying Internet voting products, nor by continuing to rely on Fax or eMail attachments in the clear.  In return, they asked for our help in figuring out how they could implement a solution that worked with real ballot and attestation documents as digital artifacts, which could be transported on an encrypted channel.  This could be better than eMail to be sure, but still using public packet-switched networks.

We turned to several of our technical advisers and convened a meeting to discuss how B.O.E.E and OCTO could approach a digital vote-by-mail Pilot to explore this approach to improving on eMail attachments or Fax’d returns.  The meeting was frank, open, and rather than continuing the rhetoric of avoidance, we witnessed a bunch of stalwarts in information security express concerns, suggest points of mitigation, and brain storm on the possibilities.  And several were kicked around, but tossed aside for want of either acceptable user experience, cost limitations, or operational practicality.  A straw man solution was framed and members of the Core Team went off to refine it knowing that there were aspects that they simply could not address with this Pilot.  Perhaps the most important Pilot parameter: this could not and would not be an exercise to completely assess and determine solutions to all of the known vulnerabilities of securing a voting transaction over a public network.

But it was agreed that a “digital vote-by-mail” process – with the known vulnerabilities and constraints – could be a “worked example” that simply was not what proprietary commercial vendors are selling. And, it was realized that such a solution could not and should not claim any victory in improved security or privacy – no such reality can exist in this solution.

And folks, that is simply and honestly the extent to which we were and are treating this: a “worked example” to serve as a vehicle for voices on all sides of the argument to train their attention in assessing, testing, and determining the viability of such an approach strictly for those overseas and military voters.

One could say the Foundation took a calculated risk: that in order to achieve the larger goal of deploying open source elections technology into a real production environment (a first, and hopefully ground breaking step), we would have to accept that our Stakeholder, B.O.E.E would use the Internet to transport a ballot and attestation document pair using the best possible techniques currently available – HTTPS and standard encryption tools.  And at some measure, at least they had chosen not to pursue a commercial proprietary Internet voting solution, given their steadfast requirement of open source software and maximum transparency.

To my activist colleagues I offer this: we’re giving you a worked example on which to build your arguments against digital transport.  Please do so! We’re with you, believe it or not.  Very frankly, I’d be happy to support some initiative to severely restrict the use of public packet switched networks for transacting voting data.

I want to (re)focus the Project’s attention on the reason a few of us gave up our paying jobs some four years ago: to build a non-profit solution to restore trust in the computers used in the various processes of casting and counting votes.  We don’t advocate iVoting.  We do advocate accuracy, transparency, trust, and security in the use of computers in elections and intend to keep working on that open source framework. We do believe limited Pilots are worth it for the special use case of UOCAVA voters,  if such a Pilot can fuel an intellectually honest debate and/or initiatives to resolve the concerns, or end the use of the Net altogether in this regard.  We think the District of Columbia’s Pilot is such a worked example.

OK, this went way over my intended length, but in the spirit of transparency its important we explain what’s been underway for the past several weeks from an authoritative source: Us. In the next installment on this topic, we will discuss more details on the technology we’ll provide for the District’s Pilot, and reiterate our concerns, but also consider the potential of the open source movement in public elections systems.

Thanks for reading.
Greg Miller

1. Digital distribution of blank ballots via email or web;
2. Digital return of marked ballots via email or fax.

The main point of the D.C. pilot is an alternative to #2. Rather than using open email, the DC pilot will transport ballot documents in a conventionally secured private Web session between the voter and a Web server operated by the DC BOEE. I won’t repeat why open email transport is a problem, but the purpose of the pilot is to produce a worked example that is a solution to at least some of the problems that are specific to email as a way to return a marked ballot document.

– EJS

We’re pleased to echo the announcement by the District of Columbia’s Board of Election and Ethics (BOEE) that they will adopt TrustTheVote technology as part of a pilot project to support the delivery and return of overseas ballots. In Washington D.C.’s September primary election, open-source technology from the TrustTheVote Project will be used to digitally deliver and return the absentee voting kits of overseas, military and absentee voters. This pilot project will test a new form of digital “Vote by Mail” ballot transport service.

The BOEE’s announcement has the details, but the gist is this:

• Some overseas and military voters are in danger of their absentee ballots not being counted, due to delays in postal delivery back to the BOEE.
• As a result some voters use fax or email for digital return of marked ballots, but these timely methods have the side-effect of compromising the integrity and anonymity of the ballot.
• The pilot project will test a Web-based alternative process that is no less timely, but lacks these side-effects, and otherwise use same familiar methods of absentee ballot casting and counting that voters and election officials use today.
• The use of TTV’s open source software is a key part of meeting the pilot project’s goals for public visibility of open technology and transparent election operations.

We’ll be saying plenty more about these efforts as we along, you can be sure!

– EJS

Today, I’m continuing on from a recent post, which compared my in-person voting experience with one method of Internet-based voting: return of marked ballots by fax or email. Next up is a similar comparison with another form of Internet-based voting: Internet voting from home using a PC’s Web browser.

Let’s briefly recall the result at the end of the day in my polling place:
1. Some paper ballots in a ballot box.
2. Some digital vote totals in a computer, and set of paper rolls that provide a ballot-like paper trail of each voter’s activity that led to those vote totals. The paper trails can be used to check the correctness of the digital vote totals.
Let’s also recall the result at the end of the day with email ballot return:
1. Some printed versions of faxed/emailed ballots, which are treated as ballots for counting purposes.
While we’re at it, let’s recall the results of the old lever machines too:
1. Some mechanical vote totals in one or more machines
2. A hand-recorded paper transcription of the “odometer” readings. (Those machines were a lot harder to move than a computer is! So the transcriptions were the basis for vote totals.)

Now, on to home-based Web i-voting. Before doing the end-of-the-day comparison, let’s start with what the experience looks like — fundamentally, it’s Web pages. You point your browser to a Web site; you type in your voter identification, a bit like the in-person poll-book signing experience; and then you get your ballot: one or more Web pages. Various Internet voting products and services differ, but they are all fundamentally similar to something that I bet many readers have seen already: online surveys. Take a look at this simple election-like survey about music in Cuyahoga County. The web page looks like a simple ballot, with contests for vocalist and guitarist instead of governor and dog-catcher. There are candidates, and you vote by selecting one with a mouse click on a radio button next to the name of your favorite.

So far, so familiar, but when I press that submit button, what happens? Where’s my ballot? Let’s take it step by step.

• The submit button is part of an HTML form, which is part of the Web page. (You can see the HTML form if you “View Page Source” in your browser.)
• Pressing the button tells your browser to collect up the form’s data, which might include Rachel Roberts for Vocalist if you had clicked the radio button next to Rachel.
• These parts of the forms data are something that in election lingo you might call a “vote” (or “contest selection” to be precise.)
• The HTML form data, including the vote-oid data, is sent from your browser to the Web server via an HTTP POST operation.
• The HTTP transaction is typically via an encrypted SSL session, to preserve privacy en route over the Internet.
• The Web server passes the POST parameters to some election-specific Web application software, which interprets the data as votes, and stores the vote data in a database.

Now, let’s be specific about that database stuff. In surveymonkey, there is a database record for each Cleveland Music survey response, and it’s possible (if the survey was set up that way) that the record also includes some information about the person who responded. In actual government voting, though, of course we don’t want that. So even though the i-voting server has a database of voters, and even though you had to log in to the i-voting server, and even though you were only allowed to vote if the voter record said you were allowed to vote, still your vote data shouldn’t be stored with your voter record. So, the vote data is supposed to be anonymously and separately stored, becoming part of vote totals for each candidate in each contest.

Can you say “odometer“? Okay, maybe it’s not that obvious, so let me juxtapose a couple images. As I recounted earlier, a much younger me is standing in the voting booth of a lever machine, looking a big bank of little switches next to candidate names, and thinking that is the ballot. Then the big lever is pulled, the little switches flip back, and it’s like the ballot just evaporated! Though of course I was told that the counter dials in the back of the machine did tick over like the odometer on a car, recording each vote. The votes were stored on the odometers, but the ballot was gone without a trace. Now shift the scene to my first surveymonkey experience. I clicked some radio buttons, clicked submit, and poof! what I thought was a ballot just disappeared. I’m told that the counters in a database somewhere ticked over to record my “votes.” Again, votes were supposedly recorded, but there wasn’t really ever a durable ballot. Home-based web client-server Internet voting is just like that, regardless of varying technical implementation details. There’s no durable ballot document.

So, at the end of the day, we have stored vote totals in a database of a system that also logged the voter logins. At that point I don’t have an answer to “What’s the ballot” anymore than I do for lever machines or the early paper-trail-less DREs. Unlike the (much-more-insecure) email ballot delivery, we don’t really know what or where the ballots are. Recalling my experience in the Middlefield Road fire house, the vote data is similarly stored as bits on a computer, but!!! there is also the paper trail. That paper trail can be used to audit the system and detect errors and fraud, and serves as the durable record of the vote — almost a ballot, except for being on flimsy paper with some ballot information left out. But with i-voting, there is nothing even similar. Any kind of auditing that’s done, is done using data saved on the server computers, rather than looking at a ballot document that the voter also saw.

Is that so terrible? Maybe so, maybe not. A durable ballot is not a holy requirement for U.S. elections — though in some parts of the country it almost is. And a durable ballot may not be a requirement for a voting system that is specifically and only for timely assistance of overseas and military voters. Such requirements are a matter of local election law and decisions of local election officials. But my critical observation here is about voter trust. Trust derives in large measure from comprehension. And for many voters, a voting system is comprehensible if the voter knows what the ballot is, where it goes, and what happens to it. That’s why overseas voters like fax and email return. Despite the security and anonymity problems, the voter understands that ballot, how it pops out of the fax/printer on the other side of the planet, and how its counted as a paper ballot. The same can’t be said for paperless home-based i-voting. As a consequence, I think that it will be harder to build trust, at least in some parts of the country that are paper-centric. However, it may be less of a big deal if limited to overseas and military voters, whose main concern is “get the the ballot home in time to be counted.” The pilots are happening, and time will tell.

– EJS

Having recently written about my CA primary voting experience, now is a good time to compare and contrast with some of the overseas-voter Internet voting pilots. The previous question “Where’s My Ballot?” applies just as well, but in some cases, we also have the question “What is my ballot?”

Starting with a recap of my polling place experience, let’s compare based on what we have at the end of the day. After a grueling +16-hour day of community service at the fire station up on Middlefield Road, poll workers packed up ballots in two different forms. First, there is a funky little computer called the Hart JBC. Most of the ballots were bits stored on disk in the JBC, and also represented as paper trails on paper rolls that the poll workers detached from the DRE voting machines. Second, some of the ballots were hand marked paper ballots in a ballot box. (I would prefer that the paper ballots have an electronic backup representation, via polling place optical scan, so that every ballot is represented both digitally and physically.)

Now let’s compare with the end of the day result for the more common of two current Internet-based voting schemes for overseas voters — fax or email return of marked vote-by-mail ballots. For those who love to hate these schemes, say what you like about the shortcomings, but it’s clear what we have at the end of the day. For some weeks prior to election day, fax machines have been spitting out arriving faxed ballots (along with absentee voter attestation documents), and printers have been spitting out arriving email attachments (ballot and attestation). The attestations were reviewed, and for each acceptable attestation, the corresponding ballot was set separated and set aside for counting. On election day, those ballots were counted, similarly or even exactly the same as the absentee ballots that arrived via USPS or FedEx.

In fact, that set-aside pile of admissible ballots isn’t all that different than the ballot box full of hand-marked paper ballots from from the Middlefield Road fire station. It’s quite clear what the ballot is, and where it is.

Now to be fair, let me mention that fax and email ballot return schemes have notable problems that we don’t have at the fire station: secret ballot and voter anonymity are kaput, and there are loads of ways that ballots can be tampered with. There’s more to say about that, and we have already but let’s stay focused on the comparison: the what and where of the ballots are as clear as is my in-person voting experience, and perhaps even clearer for this election where I voting on DRE. That clarity and ease of understanding — both the what and where — is one reason why I believe email and fax return are as popular as they are, because familiarity and comprehension breed trust more strongly than trust is diluted by security experts pointing out risks.

Next up: In Part 2, I’ll provide a similar comparison to another form of Internet-based voting: home-based client-server Internet voting, which I like to call “voting a la surveymonkey.” Stay tuned …

– EJS

Comparing with people voting on paper or turning in vote-by-mail packets at the polling place, I had to ask myself the question: where’s my ballot? The answer is in two parts.

As a techie, part of my answer is that an electronic version of my ballot is stored as bits on magnetic storage inside one of the computers in the polling place. It may or may not be not be a “ballot” per se (a distinct collection of selections in the contests), but rather just votes recorded as parts of vote total, analogous to the odometers on the old lever machines. As jaded techie, this strikes me as not the most reliable way to store my ballot.

However, as an observant voter, I can also see that my ballot is also represented by the “paper trail” on the voting machine. As an informed voter (a trained poll worker who also talks to local election officials), I know that this paper is used by election officials as part of auditing the correct operation of the computers, by manually tabulating vote totals for a handful of randomly selected precincts — an extremely important part of the election process here. However, as a jaded observant voter, the cheap paper roll (like a gas station receipt printer) strikes me as not a very durable way of recording the ballot information that I could have put on nice solid real paper ballots.

But leaving aside questions of paper stock, the combination of the two ballot recording methods is pretty good, and the audit process is great! Though I have to say: my thanks and condolences go to the hard working San Mateo County elections staff who wield scissors to cut the paper rolls into individual ballot-oid papers to be hand-tabulated in the audit.

So, as a paper ballot fan, I left reasonably satisfied, though glad of the ability to vote on paper in November. It’s a bit of a conceptual leap to go from a tangible paper ballot in a locked ballot box, to the above non-short answer to “Where’s my ballot?” But it’s a leap that I think many voters can be satisfied with, or would be if the paper trial items actually looked like ballots (as in the system we’re building at TrustTheVote). But it got me thinking about some of the overseas-voter Internet voting pilots I’ve been reading about. That’s enough for today, but a good question for another day, about Internet voting, is the same question, “Where’s my ballot?” More soon …

– EJS

The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting article on Wednesday in its Technology Journal about GlaxoSmithKline, the drug maker, experimenting with applying “open source” principles in its pharmaceutical R&D efforts.  The article is available to subscribers, possibly non-subscribers as well, but in any event, if you’re able you can find it here.

What grabbed my attention is how this is yet another example of the principles of open source development being extended to other domains and in this case pharmaceutical research.  The idea is simple enough: by making certain Glaxo research intellectual property involving processes, test suites, and other related content publicly available in a royalty-free format and with conditions on use that require contribution of derivative works and results back to the public repository hosted by Glaxo, vital medical research in pharmaceuticals may accelerate.

To be sure, this isn’t entirely novel for the pharmaceutical industry; there are two preexisting so-called “open source drug development efforts: the “Tropical Disease Initiative” (funded by USAID) and the “Drugs for Neglected Diseases” initiative. But these earlier initiatives are helping catalyze the new GlaxoSmithKline effort.

The Glaxo open source project will partner with a Silicon Valley initiative called Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and has backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Founders Fund.  Of course, disease and drug research is vital to society and it requires large funding to advance.  What I find particularly “kewl” about this is that another commercial sector is starting to realize the potential of public benefits efforts to their overall cause.

And this is precisely what the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation is attempting to do for another imperative effort: fortifying the integrity of a major piece of America’s critical democracy infrastructure — elections and voting systems.

The really good news for the OSDV Foundation cause is the capital required to accomplish is a tiny fraction of what is required to continue the efforts of pharmaceutical or genetics research.

I am pleased to see the advance of open source principles in other industries and domains; it validates the cause and invigorates the movement.  To be sure, as a capitalist at heart I remain convinced that open source efforts may not be the best solution for every market or industry, however, in some applications it is not only a preferred method, but is quite possibly the only method to achieve the goal(s).  Of course, at the OSDV Foundation and the TrustTheVote Project we believe it (open source principles) is an essential approach to building this nation’s (and possibly all democratic nations’) democracy infrastructure — the tools and services upon which we rely to ensure government’s operational continuity and the preservation of the guarantees of our constitution.

Happy Holiday Weekend
GAM|out

]]> http://www.trustthevote.org/open-source-development-philosophy-is-spreading/feed 0 http://www.trustthevote.org/open-source-development-philosophy-is-spreading http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/trustthevote/~3/fgIDViaeX_w/doug-jones-on-the-secret-ballot http://www.trustthevote.org/doug-jones-on-the-secret-ballot#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 18:51:01 +0000 E. John Sebes http://www.trustthevote.org/?p=4963 [Today I want to share some eloquent writing about the right to a secret ballot. Though Doug Jones' October 2008 remarks are about an issue that arose a couple years ago, his words remain extremely relevant, especially in the context of the current discussion of e-mail voting. The discussion with Doug started with an issue in which there was a trade-off between a well-meaning attempt to streamline polling place operations on the one hand, and the chance that as a result, a single ballot in the polling place might become attributable to a voter. With the latter being highly unlikely, should we really forego a chance to reduce opportunity for errors in polling place operations? Over to Doug ….]

If this were the only threat to the right to a secret ballot, I would not be too worried.  The problem is, if you look across the current voting system landscape, you find that the right to a secret ballot is being downplayed again and again.

• The crypto-voting folks are anxious to put serial numbers on our ballots.
• The proliferation of different ballot styles in some states creates a high likelihood that a significant number of voters in each precinct will each be the only voter using some particular ballot style in that precinct.
• Ballot tracking systems for vote-by-mail elections create the possibility that voters will be able to identify the particular batch of ballots that their ballot was in, with a high likelihood that theirs is the only ballot of some particular style that got into that batch.

In each case, the argument is that this is not a significant threat. In sum, we are at risk of losing the right to a secret ballot.

I agree that many voters today do not greatly value the right to a secret ballot.  Most of us feel free from threat of coercion, and most of our votes aren’t for sale.

However (as I said to the editor of the National Review recently), we shouldn’t ask what is good enough for us, given current conditions, but what defenses will we have in place in the event that we elect a corrupt government; and also, what example do we set for corrupt governments that we’d like to urge on the path to democracy.  If we allow a weakened right to a secret ballot, how can we ask other countries to set higher standards, and what will we do if the crooks do end up in control of our elections?

It’s important to recall that it was not too long ago that big city political machines routinely violated people’s right to a secret ballot.  I would propose that the abuses of this were sufficiently severe that the right to a secret ballot would be a reasonable benchmark for election integrity — if some threat is more serious than the loss of the right to a secret ballot, then it is a very serious threat.  If some threat model discounts threats to secret ballots as negligible, then the threat model is probably wrong.

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[A closing remark … Yes, there are several competing interests in election administration and election management, as the email debate shows. But it does seem that we need to keep a special eye on ballot secrecy, or it might might get lost in the shuffle. Even as election practices continue to evolve, as they have throughout U.S. history, we need to look for opportunities to strengthen ballot secrecy, and vigorously pursue those opportunities.

-- EJS]