Next week in San Francisco a voting machine that runs on open source software and was designed by the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit with the stated goal of moving towards “trustable and open voting systems,” will be put to use at LinuxWorld, where they will be holding a mock election. Apparently 100,000 people are expected to participate. Here are some of the details from the San Francisco Chronicle:

The LinuxWorld conference is held every year in San Francisco to discuss open-source software - software whose code is designed and maintained by volunteers. The conference takes its name from Linux, computer operating system designed by Linus Torvalds in the 1990s that has a passionate following. It competes against Microsoft Windows and has spawned software for numerous devices, including voting machines.

Open-source software is free for anyone to use, although licensing restrictions apply - changes to the code, for example, usually need to be given back to the community. The code that runs this voting machine is based on the work of a former Berkeley student, Ka-Ping Yee, who now works at Google.

At a price of about $400, the new voting machine is a tenth of the cost of proprietary machines - less if made in quantity, Dechert said - because it’s simply designed and based on free software. Its workings are transparent, he said, unlike some of the electronic voting machines that California decertified for security problems.

People who attend the conference will vote by scanning a bar code on their badges, then selecting a candidate from a computer screen. When they’re done, they will print their ballots, which will include their bar codes. A separate machine can scan the bar codes and read their votes back to them if they choose.

Votes can be audited in several ways - by manually counting the ballots, scanning the bar codes, or processing pictures of the ballots to see if the text on each ballot matches its bar code.

The article goes on to say that this particular could be certified and ready to roll in real (not mock) elections by 2010. I’m down in Los Angeles now and will be next week, and might try and make it up for LinuxWorld if I have the time. This sounds pretty cool.

Click here for a look at our past coverage of electronic voting, including an interview with a Princeton professor, the Mayor of Philly and more.

Posted in California, Election Reform, Election administration, Electronic voting, Open Source | 1 Comment »

A sincere thank-you to the Los Angeles Press Club for honoring the work we do at Why Tuesday? as part of their first National Entertainment Journalism Awards. I’m honored to be the inaugural recipient of the award for best TV news story, even though our primary platform for distribution is the web — a good sign for vloggers! We also received honorable mention for best online feature.

LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke, who swept the online awards, rounds up the rest of the winners and links to the complete list here. (more…)

Posted in California, WT? in the news | Comments Off

NEW YORK, NEW YORK — On Super Tuesday, we brought you the case of the Double Bubble Trouble from Los Angeles. Because of voter error, whether it came about by misunderstandings by poll workers, voters, or a bad ballot design, potentially hundreds of thousands of ballots were in vote-count limbo on Super Tuesday. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that 49,000 votes will be thrown out.

On Super Tuesday, Barnett Zitron, our Strategic Director, filed the following dispatch from Los Angeles:

The process is this: decline-to-state voters who wish to exercise their franchise in the Democratic Primary must ask the poll-workers for a Democratic ballot. Fair enough.

Here’s the trouble: In the voting booth, voters must then mark a bubble on the ballot that confirms the voter is indeed voting on a Democratic ballot. If they fail to mark, their ballots go uncounted. And further, if a voter neglects to fill in this bubble, a voting machine will not return the ballot because the vote is counted as an under-vote. In Los Angeles County alone, 776,000 voters are susceptible to double bubble trouble.

(more…)

Posted in California, Election 2008, Election Reform | Comments Off

PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA — With the onset of Super Tuesday, the Press has started reporting on Barack Obama’s ability to mobilize new, youth and Independent voters, the other candidates’ advantages among established, older voters, and Hillary Clinton’s advantage among Hispanic and female voters. This week’s issue of TIME Magazine reports that Obama’s campaign tactics are more effective in states with forward-thinking election law. Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada have Same-Day Registration. Florida has early voting, but the DNC has stripped the Sunshine State’s democrats of their delegates, Republicans were able to keep half of theirs. (more…)

Posted in Absentee ballots, California, Colorado, Early voting, Election 2008, Election Day registration, Election Reform, Election administration, Florida, General, Iowa, Legislation, National Holiday, Nevada, New Hampshire, Opinions, Primary schedule, What is Super Tuesday? | Comments Off