San Francisco’s open source voting project is quickly becoming a reality. Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed budget includes $300,000 towards planning and development of an open source voting system that would allow the city to own and share the software. Dominion Voting Systems, formerly known as Sequoia Voting, has provided San Francisco’s voting technology for years, but its contract with the city and county expires at the end of the year, according to KQED News. “When you rely on an outside vendor, it’s their technology, which is proprietary and confidential, and the public really doesn’t have access to the code that they’re relying on,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener, who’s running for state Senate. “It’s very ‘black box,’ so we just have to have faith that their machines are producing accurate results,” he told KQED.
Advocates say open source voting technology is cheaper, more transparent and more secure than today’s “black box” systems, which run on vendor-specific systems. Open source software is free, does not have annual license fees, runs on off-the-shelf hardware, can be combined with other systems, and is viewable and editable by anyone. Vice president of San Francisco’s Election Committee and open source software developer Chris Jerdonek estimated that an open source voting system for San Francisco will cost $6 million over three years, compared to $13.8 million for the first four years (in 2007 dollars) for its current system.
According to Ars Technica, Los Angeles has been working on a similar plan since 2009 that is expected to go live in 2020.
“Our nation’s elections systems and technology are woefully antiquated,” Greg Miller of the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation told Forbes. “They are officially obsolete.” Miller said open source voting software will instill confidence in voters that their votes are being accurately counted. As the software will be openly viewable (not editable) by the public, citizens can verify the integrity of the system. This confidence will get more voters to the polls.
Full Article: San Francisco funds open source voting — GCN.