Accessible voting and a precise count

On the Wiki, RU says, "I'm interested in whether a bunch of hacker geniuses can come up with the solution to having accessible voting and a precise count. Some kind of 'Here's how it can be done' statement would be very powerful."

There are groups already doing this, right? Does anybody know more than I do, or should I flog Google some more? I just wanted to get this into wider discussion. Don't disappoint me!

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Permalink Reply by Jon Lebkowsky on December 26, 2007 at 9:44pm: I've been somewhat involved in evoting discussions, and as far as I know, no one has done more than propose an Open Source alternative. I.e. I know of no one who's actually building an OS voting system. I agree that we should make that a high priority for the OS hopefully-non-party party.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on December 26, 2007 at 11:30pm: Whaaa? Really? That's utterly wacky! It's not like it's rocket science!

OK, I'm gonna flog Google more. This needs to happen and I really can hardly believe it's not being done. If it's *NOT* being done, then I propose we damn well do it, in January, and I don't mean "talk about it in January", I mean "start, design, and finish in January" because it really isn't rocket science. And yes, I will do this myself if there's nothing out there, and I expect you all to laud me forever as the coder who saved America.

But you won't, because I flatly refuse to believe nobody else has done it.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by RU Sirius on December 27, 2007 at 12:21pm: I'd be interested in any proposals that are actually out there. Lots of times these sorts of things exist in fragments until some bunch of cranks (like us) come along and say, let's come up with the complete proposal. Getting this done in January would be awesome...

RU; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Steve T on January 8, 2008 at 7:36pm: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_Voting

"Legislation has been introduced in the United States Congress to ban black box voting by requiring public release of source codes, including hardware and firmware information. One such bill, entitled the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 - HR 811, was introduced by Congressman Rush D. Holt, Jr..This bill was changed in committee, and has dropped all requirements for public disclosure of the source codes, and for the first time, codifies the concept of black box voting into federal law by requiring protection of secret voting machine codes, and taking the unprecedented step of requiring nondisclosure agreements for even the limited set of "qualified experts" allowed to look at the code. In effect, this turned the HR 811 Bill into a "Black Box Voting" bill."
How about that?
Also from the article: "Even with some open source systems, which allow examination of the source code, access to firmware, which controls the hardware, is not available."
Not sure which are the otherwise opensource systems and whether they're actually fully developed.
EFF seems to disagree though: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/06/hr-811-separating-truth-fictio...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Steve T on January 8, 2008 at 7:53pm: Here's one!
http://rubyvote.rubyforge.org/
just a library and still pre-release, but still cool

Oasis has approved EML (Election Markup Language) here's a FAQ:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/election/faq.php
Try searching sourceforge.net for "voting"; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on January 8, 2008 at 8:33pm: See? Told ya. It has to be there, after all the kerfluffle in ... holy crap, has it really been that long?

Anyway -- even if we just catalog all this and roll it into a running, tested system (which should really not be difficult), this would be a great subproject.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Steve T on January 8, 2008 at 8:55pm: One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn to program, but this stuff probably needs work and would be a tough first project! But I'm sure I could contribute in some form.

As to "subproject" I can think of nothing that would lend more credibility to a Political Party than leading by example. Any tenets that are proposed that are backed up by real work, action and momentum would be quite a change I think (to a political system); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael on January 9, 2008 at 4:00am: This is already a contribution, Steve -- finding what's out there is a tremendous help. Feel free to find more. I will happily put it all together into a working system, step by step, and you can see what I'm doing the whole time, and jump in where you feel like you see what's going on.

I agree 100% with your point on credibility. It's really true that the world is so starved of non-empty rhetoric that when anybody does anything it's a topic of conversation.; ▶ Reply to This