With counties staring down eventual replacement of their election management systems, some in California and Texas are leading the charge for an alternative that could save counties a lot of money and change an industry. Open-source voting would use software designed by counties, which could run on inexpensive computer terminals to design, print and count paper ballots. All of which purportedly increases transparency and security, Most of the savings would come from eliminating the software license fees charged for management system vendors’ proprietary programs. Twelve years after the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandated new voting technology, the machines and software are reaching the end of their usable lives in counties nationwide, and voting officials are feeling pressure. Travis County, Texas’ machines have generally been reliably operational — though a few have begun freezing — but County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said she is worried they won’t remain in working order for long. HAVA’s $3.5 billion that helped fund the new election management systems will likely not be replenished to help replace them. “It’s the same urgency we all feel in counties everywhere,” she said. “We all bought new voting systems at the same time and now we’re all watching them approach their ends-of-life at the same time. Counties just don’t have multi-millions to pay for new voting systems.”
Inyo County, Calif., with fewer than 19,000 residents, doesn’t have the money. Kammi Foote, the county’s clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, serves as the president of the California Association of Voting Officials and National Association of Voting Officials, which advocate for the use of open source-voting systems in public elections. Inyo is partnering with several other small California counties to release a request for proposals to build an open-source system for their use. “The voting machine vendors were helpful when every voting district in the country needed to buy new machines in a hurry, but election officials don’t like to be rushed,” she said. “We need options so that doesn’t happen again.”
Full Article: California, Texas Serve as Testing Grounds for Open-Source Voting Technology | PublicCEO.