“Open source for elections
“I listened to two talks that spoke directly to using open
source for public elections. Long-time readers have seen my prior
articles discussing open source for elections and my work with the
Open Voting Consortium (OVC). In fact, I’ve presented technical
results of OVC’s demo/prototype systems at previous OSCONs.“One of the talks this year was by Neal McBurnett, who developed
a system using Django for Election Verification for the city of
Boulder, Colorado. Aside from the technical issues that he
discussed, the wonderful and remarkable thing is that he managed to
move the county to use these systems in 2008, thereby improving the
reliability and transparency of those elections.“McBurnett’s talk did not delve too deep into his specific code,
but more interestingly looked at design principles for election
auditing and more generally for elections systems. One of the most
important principles he mentioned was Rivest and Wack’s notion of
“software independence” for elections. In short, this is the idea
that the dependence on software is non-essential and importantly,
each component is replaceable and operates on well-defined
interfaces. Paper ballots and open formats are the main elements of
this software independence.”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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