Earlier this year, before starting this Advogato journal, I
traveled from Chicago out to Washington DC to attend
several events related to voting. I've been meaning to
document them somewhere. This seems to be as good a place
as any.
In January 2000, I was able to attend a one day
symposium on
The Future of Internet Voting, sponsored by The Brookings Institution
and Cisco Systems. The
event included a
number of big name people.
In February 2000, I was able to attend the founding
assembly of the Internet Voting
Technology Alliance. Although the IVTA seemed to have a
solid beginning, it hasn't really accomplished much as of
this writing.
In March/April 2000, I was able to attend a conference put
on by the Voting
Integrity Project. It was quite a good conference -
mixing, in one place, people from a
number of different
disciplines related to voting.
In August 2000, I drove out to DC to attend a meeting
sponsored by the US Federal
Election Commission. The meeting was to review a
partial draft of updated US Voting
System Standards published by the FEC, and used by most
of the US states to certify voting systems for public
elections. It was a beneficial meeting.
In the next few weeks I plan to publish my feedback to
the FEC on this partial draft of the updated VSS. I
am fairly certain that I am the only person from the
open-source/free-software realm to be working with the FEC
on this. All the other people either work for a for-profit
voting system vendor, are a government official, or are
involved with performing certification tests on the voting
systems.
My primary concern is insuring that none of the FEC
requirements prevent an open-source or free-software voting
system from being certified. My secondary concern is trying
to insure they don't make the requirements unnecessarily
narrow - and thus prevent voting systems with
non-traditional designs from being built.