[lowcostcomputing] Re: The Open Source dilemma for governments
- From: Edward Cherlin <edward.cherlin@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lowcostcomputing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 10:18:10 -0800
On Tuesday 06 January 2004 04:00 pm, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
wrote:
> http://consultingtimes.com/osgov.html
The Open Voting Consortium, http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/,
is tackling another aspect of the local government software
market, the broken proprietary voting software and currently
provided by vendors such as Diebold and Sequoia, and the wildly
incompatible and insecure voting practices of more than 3,000
counties in the US. The OVC system will be Open Source, and will
support handicapped accessibility and any combination of
languages. We will use touch-screen computers, which make it
easy to prevent overvoting completely, and greatly reduce
unintentianal undervoting, and can provide for private,
unassisted voting by the blind and visually impaired (using
text-to-speech technology) and the physically impaired. Our
systems will cost substantially less than the proprietary
products.
The key element in the OVC design is a voter-verified,
machine-readable paper ballot. The printed ballot is not an
audit trail. It is the legal vote. The computer records are an
additional and essential audit trail, but the paper ballot is
primary. The reason for this is that a combined paper and
computer vote can be made extremely difficult to fake, if proper
procedures are mandated and followed. The phrase "extremely
difficult" means "as difficult as breaking standard
cryptographic systems of the kind used to secure financial
transactions".
You can find a link to an online demo of the system at
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ContentFrame/EVM2003.asp.
It will let you make selections in several types of election, and
print the resulting ballot paper.
--
Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist
Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd.
Computers for all of us
http://www.simputerland.com, http://cherlin.blogspot.com
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