San Francisco could launch a major makeover of its voting systems this year, an effort that supporters say will lead to cheaper, more transparent elections in the city. On Tuesday, Supervisor Scott Wiener will call for a Board of Supervisors hearing into the city’s efforts to adopt a voting system that would use off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. Elections officials, politicians and voter-participation activists have all touted such publicly owned balloting systems as cheaper and more trustworthy than using products supplied by private vendors. “We want to set a trend here and around the country toward more open and transparent voting systems,” Wiener said in an interview. “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 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.”
Chris Jerdonek, vice president of the San Francisco Elections Commission, is also a proponent of open-source voting systems. “We’ve got a huge opportunity and San Francisco has a chance to take a real leadership role,” Jerdonek said in an interview. If the city succeeds in building and certifying an open-source system, other counties and states could follow suit, he said. “We live in the center of technology innovation, and every successful startup or technology company uses a lot of open source. And government is pretty much the only part of our society that doesn’t.”
Voting equipment companies do not want local governments to move in that direction. They say their software is more secure and that open-source systems would make it easier for people to hack into elections.
For years Dominion Voting, formerly known as Sequoia Voting, has supplied the city’s elections hardware and software and made its staff available to support using those programs. But its contract expires at the end of the year. “It’s certainly a threat to our business,” Steven Bennett, the company’s regional sales manager, said in an interview.
Full Article: S.F. Officials Push for Adoption of Pioneering Open-Source Voting System | News Fix | KQED News.