This is really cool: the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) is launching VotingWorks — a public interest non-profit that wants to build better, i.e. safe and secure, voting machines. I love it.
VotingWorks aims to shake up the voting equipment market by creating a new non-profit voting systems manufacturer with the mission of being the public works for voting systems. VotingWorks will do this by developing voting equipment that 1) embody the state-of-the-art in usability, security, design, and development; 2) are affordable to maximize any benefit to all sizes of election jurisdictions; 3) allow speedy, efficient voting processes; and, 4) that is extensible to the needs of all types of localities. And all of this will be developed in the open for the public good.
The need here is very real. Election officials often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when choosing a new voting system; there are often few expensive choices that come with serious limitations in how these systems can be used, modified, improved, and studied. CDT has advised localities in procurement decisions in the past and contributed to efforts where jurisdictions are designing their own voting systems – such as the Los Angeles County VSAP project – and the common factor in all these cases is the wide variety of needs and requirements that elections present, and how few systems can meet them all.
CDT will serve as a home for VotingWorks until it becomes its own non-profit entity. This partnership means VotingWorks is working closely with the CDT’s experienced team to rapidly ramp up operations and begin in earnest the development of affordable, secure, open-source voting machines for use in US public elections.
Two thumbs up from here. We need this.
I don’t believe the problem has EVER been that security and ease of use is unavailable. I think we do things every single day that are secure and easy. These are not impossible tasks in the modern world.
I believe we don’t have consistent, secure, unimpeachable voting processes because the politicians don’t WANT such a thing. It’s simply not in their perceived best interest to have things be black and white. It’s much better for the fudge process that ALWAYS takes place on BOTH sides to ensure that every two years we all pretend like we’ve never had an election before and that the process is just not perfect. There are just too many ways to game the system, which is really for their benefit anyway, the way it is now. It’s always been that way, it’s just that in more recent elections, BECAUSE technology shines a light on everything, we’ve all become aware of what is going on. All the voter fraud, vote harvesting, “found ballots”, dead voters, double voting, and voter impersonation that used to go unreported with the media’s cooperation, now gets exposed by independent sources.
Thus every American election gets decided in part by Judges.
It’s the way they want it and the way it will STAY until the insiders, not The People, and not some third party corporation with a good idea, decide to change it for some other personal benefit. You are missing the point if you think the problem is unavailability of technology.