[TriLUG] OT: OpenVote

[Charles Fischer]

Being a tax and spend liberal, I want to spend the least amount of money 
to get a very reliable voting system. Any new system must be at least as 
easy as the current system for all voters to use and to count the votes 
in a better way.

Any new system should overcome many of the problems with the current 
systems. A simple change to the optical scan ballots used in Orange 
county would be to require a vote for each election. To allow for a vote 
in each election the ballot must have a “I choose not to vote for any 
candidate in this race” option. For races where the voter can vote for 
multiple candidates the ballot must allow for multiple “I choose not to 
vote” options. Having ballots for each precinct available at each county 
polling place would help voter turn out. Provisional ballots have at 
least two advantages. First if a voter has been removed from the voter 
registration rolls by mistake (think Florida 2000) their vote could 
still be registered. Second, poll workers could be more aggressive, 
because a voter would never be denied a provisional ballot. The system 
must offer a human readable, voter verifiable long lasting final ballot.

Touch screen systems can help make sure voters fill out a ballot in a 
logical way, by checking that each race is filled out with the correct 
number of selections. The computer can be programmed with a wide range 
of language options. The font size can be enlarged for the vision 
impaired. Images can be used for the illiterate. For the blind the 
systems can be used with head phones and a simple large braille keypad. 
After the voter has filled out the ballot the system should print the 
ballot in human readable form and record the votes electronically. The 
printed ballot should be in English and what ever language the voter 
selected. All candidate's names should be on the printed ballot, with 
the selected candidate marked in some easy to scan visible way. The 
electronically recorded votes should be recorded in a redundant and long 
lasting way. I would use two CD burners with UDF software. The printed 
paper ballot would go to a scanner to be recorded. At the end of the day 
the CDs are read by a different computer at the precinct and totaled. 
The optical scan counts are then totaled by hand and checked with the 
electronic counts. If the totals match, great. If the totals do not 
match, then a hand count of the paper ballots should be conducted. The 
poll workers should be allowed to make copy of the CDs for the observers 
and the press. The systems should not have any networking hardware. The 
systems must also be hard to damage. Booting from CF cards allow for 
dropping systems, and for sealed systems.

Just a few suggestions. If somebody wants to do a FOSS voting system, 
count me in for some programming time.

-Charles Fischer