Open Source Voting Systems: A Digital Public Works Project

Glad to be here! We're happy to have the chance for some dialogue and hopefully some meaty questions that we haven't thought about before. One thing I've learned by diving into all this voting stuff is ... there is a lot to learn!

Well, my colleague Greg Miller deserves the credit there. He brought to me the idea than an open-source group could do a much better job on e-voting technology than what we've been seeing for the last several years. I was and remain a recovering silicon valley startup-aholic; Greg and I worked together on a couple ventures in the past, and he knew I was looking for something different to do. Starting from the startup viewpoint, I had figure out 2 things. First, I had to understand why the market for e-voting technology was so under-served. It's not like these voting systems companies are evil, or incompetent, or want to deliver systems that mis-behave and create press liability for them. Secondly, I had to understand how any technology I knew anything about could meet those market needs better. It was an almost immediate realization that from a technology perspective, this was really not a large and difficult problem. Most of the problems the for-profit vendors have are results of a few really bad, hasty decisions that in hindsight are pretty understandable. As a non-profit, we can do a lot better without any one part of the puzzle having to take a lot of effort. That was enough to get me going!

There's a lot packed into that term "open source"! But maybe the most important part is simple "open" in the sense of visible and transparent, or in the sense of not proprietary technology. Given that the current crop of e-voting products get a lot of coverage for mis-behaving, it is particularly hard for the public to trust them when the vendors regard these systems as intellectual property to be protected.

So, for example in New Jersey, one vendor is creating legal hurdles for government officials to have some systems independently investigated after they created some irregularities. That's not helpful for trust, and it certainly isn't in the public good.

Our alternative model is that the next generation of e-voting technology will have been developed openly, and maintained and held in the public trust. The more specific meaning of "open source" is that all the technology is available for general use, not proprietary, etc. In the more limited context, that's important for the organizations that choose to use this technology in products and services for the counties.

Hi Barb-
Gregory Miller here, Chief Development officer, joining a bit late from another meeting. Thanks for your question. We're a (pending) 501(c)(3) public benefits corporation based in the Silicon Valley. As such our funding will come from four sources: [1] large grantor organizations such as other Foundations, who will fund specific projects within our master project road map; [2] government research grants (where we qualify); [3] private philanthropic investors or social venture capitalists (who may fund either specific programs or operating overhead, which is minimal/skeleton); and [4] the general public (for operating expenses and outreach programs).

I'd argue that the processes of voting all over the world have varying degrees of irregularities and challenges. The U.S. is not alone in that experience. However, our organization is focused on the U.S. challenges FIRST and foremost. Theory has it, if we're successful here in helping America define the blueprints for digital voting equipment, we may be able to help others some day. I have to admit we're heads down on the myriad challenges int he U.S. system.

No, it's not a software problem mainly. There are lots of different types of e-voting system components, and each one of them has a particular type of application software, for example, acquiring data from a scanner peripheral, and interpreting that data as votes from a scanned ballot. So there are several application SW packages, but none of them is terribly complex.

The hard part to date has been that these SW functions have been built on platforms that were convenient to develop for quickly, but which created a host of quality and reliability problems in the field. And also some real trust problems and security concerns that have been well-publicized, so I won't go into them.

So the problem is really one of what one of my guides (a former National Academy of Engineering head) called "just good choices, and good design." As a non-profit, we have the luxury of being able to make better choices, and indeed when one choice turns out not to be good, to start again!

The responses have been excitingly positive. And during our due-diligence phase last year, this was a bit of a threshold question for us in considering whether this effort could be viable.

We surmised that given the enormous outpouring of support for the Presidential Primaries where donations are *not* tax deductible, that many of those same people would equally care as about HOW America votes as they do WHO America votes for. That seems to be right.

On the funding side, we're in active discussions with several ealry funders to provide both directed funds for specific projects such as digital voter registration services (an important part of the overall system), as well as some operational support for outreach campaigns, presentations we're making for upcoming events, etc.

On the in-kind support, there is equally exciting news. We're in discussions with several of the computer industry's leading companies who are interested in supporting our work in innovative ways even beyond donations and extended loans of equipment and services. For example, one company has suggested the "loaning" of senior technologists to the Lab on a say, 90 day period ...sabbatical like, where the Company pays the employees salary and benefits while they donate their intellectual capital to Lab work at OSDV. Another chip and IC manufacturer is interested in being available to help with providing fundamental hardware building blocks (chips, circuit boards, etc.) for the open source effort to build up application-specific hardware prototypes.

So all in all, the enthusiasm for this is beyond our expectations. In general, every single person or organization I speak to in my capacity as CDO for OSDV totally "gets" what we're trying to do and how imperative it is for the cornerstone of our democracy. The concept of a "digital public works" project is as energizing to them as it is to us.

I can think of a couple. One is "Electronic Elections" by Alvarez and Hall. It focuses on the e-voting tech stuff pretty well, but it's also a bit dense and on the academic side. But it does a good job of using risk analysis to present a balanced view.

Another is "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone. It's not about e-voting directly, really more about election reform per se. And it's very entertaining! But much of what Poundstone ends up advocating (essentially, we should use range voting) requires some new use of technology for e-voting - or so many people would claim. This book is good for getting you thinking about one of my favorite questions -- if we had elections that were conducted well (including the use of tech), how could we make them better? For the moment it's a moot point because the tech is one of several factors making it hard to conduct elections well.

John really covered this well, but let me add in a Simpleton's view: [1] government is under a constitutional mandate to use administrative processes typically subject to a regulatory scheme. This bureaucratic overhead simply is not conducive to the typical high technology methodologies of research and development. [2] Government projects are necessarily reliant on public funding, which is by definition politically controlled. Bottom line: government efforts twist int he political wind of appropriations, budgets (deficits, cuts, etc.) and therefore as those of us who've worked int he commercial side of the world in selling to governments know that any project that exceeds the time frame of a Congressional cycle have very little financial stability.

So between those two issues/challenges, the Government is not the best situated to lead an open source project to define the architectures, specifications, and blueprints for trustworthy digital voting equipment. They can (and do) provide guidelines as promulgated by various agencies such as the FEC and EAC, but beyond that, this is work for an outside entity.

Well, the short answer is that the government doesn't want to! But let's be specific about "the process" - building a new generation of e-voting technology that does a much better job of meeting requirements and earning trust. There simply isn't a government body (that I know of) that would have the responsibility for fostering an effort that could be perceived as competing with existing for-profit companies. That would be a mis-perception, but remember that this is a political issue!

And I'll anticipate the next question, which is what is in fact the role of government, specifically the Federal government? There are agencies such FEC, EAC, and NIST that offer guidance and set voluntary standards, in the hopes that vendors will use them to improve products, and/or state use them to set a higher bar for certification, and/or counties demand better products.

That's a fine responsibility for incremental improvement. We're not doing an increment in the current model - we're working in a different model.

I can answer that from the point of view of development efforts.

1) adapting and minimizing an open-source Unix system as the platform for various other components of an e-voting system

2)implementing one or two prototype systems on that high-assurance platform - probably part of an EMS, and/or a ballot scanner, depends partly on the interest of the participants

3) starting a longer project on an open-source state-level voter registration system

And there's also an e-voting poll observance projects, some other requirements-gathering efforts for (1)-(3) above, outreach efforts, community building, fund-raising, and lots more to spin up the org and keep it going.

Dave, let me try to clarify your question a bit. I presume you may be referring to the notion of a "digital public works" project as well as from whom or what we're gaining insight. OK...

First, we admire the Mozilla Foundation for its work in developing productivity tools for the digital economy. So you think of FireFox first, but then there is also their fine eMail tool, Thunderbird and other developments.

So structurally as an organization Mozilla comes to mind. Another is the OpenMoko effort to define an open source mobile phone operating platform.

Then there is the (obvious) admiration one must have for the work of Google on both productivity tools like their Calendar and Word Processor and of course, Android (another take on OpenMoko).

Finally, and this is a thread of another discussion entirely and probably better suited for our CTO John, we're probably blazing some real new trails here; at least two:

[1] the marriage of high assurance engineering methodologies with the process of open source development. The former is a high disciplined, structured approach to building some of the most fault tolerant equipment in the world, while the latter is a highly agile, highly distributed, sometimes chaotic meritocratic approach. We think of this integrated as a yin-yang methodology.. a natural friction must and will exist, and that is why we will have a small core team of senior technical architects who are marshaling the overall efforts.

[2] the trail blazing of a digital public works project. Public works projects are generally thought of as government funded (your tax dollars at work or municipal bonds), whereas this project is publicly funded. There is much more to be said about this, but let me toss that out as a start of an answer that deserves some real-time dynamic exchanges or a longer written answer.

Yes we have. The hard part is using what is for now an all-volunteer group of people to spin up even one ongoing project in which many people have the chance to contribute manageable chunks of work.

So for example, right now I'm working with a volunteer to make a one version of the platform, but structured with a number of small to medium tasks for other folks to do, to trim down the platform to be (close to) only what it needed to support the application SW packages for EMSs, scanners, markers, etc.

I think that the voter registration system project will be a bit easier, because it's very well specified already as a number of distinct chunks of work.

OK, so let me sound a bit activist about this with the following proviso. First, like my partner, I've spent a good deal of my career in new venture work, both on the start-up side as a venture backed entrepreneur and on the VC side as a deal analyst and an adviser/catalyst to start-ups seeking to grow and fund their dreams, where my most recent commercial work took place. That noted, I *am* a true capitalist at heart and completely support the capitalism model. I am also a pragmatist.

So... here's the simple problem: the commercial vendor has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and returns. It is a necessary mandate of the commercial model. And so long as shareholder interests (must) come first, the public interest will not. Its that simple.

I do *not* fault the commercial sector for that business model. But I *do* fault them for trying to apply it wherein the resulting product is the cornerstone of our democracy. The trouble is that there is no motivation on their part to do the heavy lifting, make the large investments, and do the proper non-recurring engineering effort to build truly trustworthy machinery form the ground up. It simply does NOT pencil out (read: insufficient ROI).

This is where the OSDV model shines and is potentially so breakthrough: OSDV is taking the heavy lifting off the shoulders of the commercial sector; the OSDV will design, specify, and develop the architecture and blueprints (if you will) including sample and reference implementations for how these machines must be built. And we'll do so in a highly transparent, public open source manner. Then ANY commercial vendor will be able to take a royalty-free license to the technology to build their commercial products, have them run through a certification process by OSDV (and will also need to be certified by NIST and EAC, who will also certify our work earlier), and then sell and service the resulting systems. BTW: it should be obvious that is where those vendors make their coin: on going support and service.

The commercial approach hasn't worked well so far, if you measure success by customer satisfaction of the counties that purchase e-voting products, or public confidence, or any credit of brand goodwill to the vendors.

That came about because of a sort of mini-gold-rush mentality a few years back when there was this load of Federal money from the Help America Vote Act (HAVA, and time to market was all. It's not a surprise that high quality was not a result, and indeed, there were few requirements around quality.

Now, the vendors are stuck with what they brought to market, and have little incentive to go "back to the drawing board". In fact, the market for e-voting systems is small enough that really they probably shouldn't try to justify it to shareholders even if they wanted to.

I think that we can use pretty much any kind of support in a broad range below. But in all cases what they should do is go to our Web site http://osdv.org and hit the join button. Fill out a short form, indicate whether you have some particular type of work you'd like to do or skill to apply. And we'll contact you, and figure out how to put you to work in our community!

That said, here's a list of types

contributions of technical effort, including but not limited to open source OS distro, database app development, XML extensions and data interchange programming, app integration and development;

contributions of technical infrastructure support for things like drupal, wordpress, mediawiki;

contributions of technical infrastructure support like writing and visual creatives for some of our media events, legal services, local organizing for the observance project;

financial support;

support for fund-raising efforts, help with grant proposal writing;

help getting the word out about the work we're doing! Join the Facebook group, tell all your friends, and so on!

First, thanks so much for inviting us here to talk about the OSDV Foundation and Project!

A mentor of mine as well as a Board Member regularly reminds me of what I know to be true: at the end of the day, we are but shepherds of what we hope to be a real movement with real results: breakthrough, next generation digital voting equipment that people can actually see, touch, and try. As such, the OSDV project will and needs to take on a life of its own. Our job will be to merely shepherd the effort.

So this is far from anything about us, and all about everyone else... those who will donate mind share to the design, specification, and development work; those will donate a few dollars here and there to keep the operation alive so the larger grantor organizations will fund the specific projects, and even those who offer feedback to design reviews, focus groups, and public comment opportunities.

If you are eligible to vote, you are eligible to help this effort. And there are many many ways to do so far beyond engineering or development or simply donating a couple of dollars.

As Chief Development Officer, I'd be remiss if I didn't toss in this thought too. We've pushed the spreadsheets, and here is an interesting thought: if 80% of all the people who've made a non tax deductible donation to any presidential primary campaign were to say, "Nope I have NO interest or care in how I vote or whether my votes count or what the OSDV is trying to do to help that, and so no, I will not support the OSDV" ...if 8 out of 10 people said that, then the remaining 20% who did each give us a one time $20(tax deductible) donation, would completely fund 2 years of work to restore trust in the system and deliver trustworthy voting technology.

To me, that says two things: [1] an enormous amount of money is being poured into elections (estimated to be over $1B for this presidential race before its over)... that is, an election that will (this time) rely on the very same infrastructure with all its shortcomings, irregularities and faults that we've had to endure since 2000, and [2] the cost for OSDV to FIX that is 8/10ths of 1% of the total projected cost of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Think about that.

So I guess in closing I'd say please JOIN the OSDV effort. You count in this democracy, so make the small effort to make sure that going forward your choices, your voices, and your ballots count too.
Cheers

It's been a real pleasure, thanks very much!

Last words, well, this is community effort, with room for all. It's not about the people who are involved now, knowing how to fix all the problems, and just getting the work done. It's about continuing to build a larger community of people -- many of whom know more about the problems and solutions, the means and the ends, than we do today.

And as I said in answering the question about what people can do, there are plenty tasks large and small of many kinds for people with many types of skills.

And perhaps the most important task can be done by those with interest but not a lot of time to contribute - keep helping us get the word out to broaden awareness and continue to find folks who are able to contribute.