Subject: Open Voting Consortium
Monday, March 22, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Contacts
Alan Dechert 916-791-0456
Jan Kärrman +46 18 509 507 (Sweden, 10a-1p Pac.)
Arthur Keller 650-424-0202
Fred McLain 206-679-2198
(Washington)
Doug Jones 319-335-0740 (Iowa)
David Mertz 413-863-4552
(Massachusetts)
Laird Popkin 917-453-0700 (New
York)
All can be reached via email: firstname@openvoting.org
References
Doug Jones's Voting Page:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
Alan Dechert's talk at UC Santa
Cruz:
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/oct26forum.htm
Paul Andrew's column today in the Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001884976_paul22.html
GRANITE BAY, CALIFORNIA - The Open Voting Consortium will
demonstrate a version of its free election software on the 1st of April at
10:00 AM in the Santa Clara County government office building, 70 W. Hedding St., room 157, San Jose. The Open Voting Consortium
intends to make free voting software available for use in public elections to
begin a process founders hope will transform the voting system from a
fraud-prone, blackbox, proprietary, expensive,
idiosyncratic, unreliable system to a technically sound, accurate, secure,
inexpensive, uniform and open voting system.
An international team of volunteer scientists and
engineers developed the demonstration system. Jan Kärrman
of Sweden, a senior research engineer at Uppsala University says that the role
of the U.S. internationally "makes it important, outside the U.S. as well,
that fair elections are being held there."
John-Paul Gignac of Canada wrote the software for the
graphical user interface. Anand Pillai of Bangalore India, Eron Lloyd of Pennsylvania, and Dr. David Mertz of
Massachusetts have been the other main software code contributors. Fred McLain, a noted computer security expert
from Washington, has served as the lead developer over the past two months.
"I am very pleased with the outstanding contributions of this world wide
group of contributers. In a short period of time they have created a
ballot system with a paper trail, an outstanding verification system and allow
for vision impaired users as well," McLain stated.
MORE..
A simulation of the poll-site voting machine is available
on the Internet. Users can print the
same ballot as with the standalone voting machine, or they can view the ballot
on the screen. "We're happy to make
this available," says Laird Popkin, a software
wizard from New York who developed the user interface for the Internet
simulation. "This really helps
people to get what we're talking about."
"Voters should not be fooled into thinking their
vote is secure with paperless electronic voting machines. We need a system like the Open Voting
Consortium is developing that produces a paper ballot that voters can see,
touch, and verify before placing in the ballot box," according to Dr.
Arthur Keller, who teaches computer science at UC Santa Cruz, and serves as
Vice President of the Open Voting Consortium.
Professor Douglas W. Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and
often-quoted expert on voting technology, agrees: "It's too easy to fool
with a purely electronic record. We need
a physical token to represent the vote so that it can be checked by ordinary
human beings. We also want a system
where all aspects of the system are open to public inspection so we can be sure
everything is above board." Dr. Jones is also the Chief Technology Officer
and Vice President of the Open Voting Consortium.
"We are not in favor of having a public process run
by private companies that want to keep everything a secret," says Alan Dechert, President of the Open Voting Consortium. "It was wise to commit serious funding
to modernize the voting system. But it
would be foolish to spend all the money on immature technology that will be
obsolete in a few years. We advocate
spending a small percentage of this money on a comprehensive scientific
research and development project that will give us the best possible voting
system." The Help America Vote Act
of 2002 (HAVA) earmarks nearly four billion dollars for voting
modernization. Over $1.5 billion has
been appropriated for this fiscal year.
"We are working with universities in several states to get this
project launched. Iowa State University
and the University of California are leading the way, with strong teams
developing in Illinois and Nevada, so far."
The Open Voting Consortium is a Nonprofit California
Corporation dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open
voting systems for use in public elections.
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