When Computers Vote

By Jack J. Woehr

September 12, 2005

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The Open Voting Consortium describes itself as "a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections." To this end, the OVC is designing voting stations, ballot counting equipment, and open source software to run fair and auditable elections. They started with the voting machines themselves, with an open source project appearing on SourceForge as the Electronic Voting Machine Project.

Their efforts have garnered some notable attention in California and in the national press. Could this be the answer to the crisis of confidence in electronic voting in the United States? With this question in mind, I spoke by phone with Open Voting's Alan Dechert (President and CEO), Arthur Keller (OVC Co-founder and Secretary), and David Mertz (Vice President and CTO, also author of the IBM Developer Works column "Charming Python").

BYTE.com: Electronic voting is in trouble, down to the encryption issues [see "A Conversation with Avi Rubin," Dr. Dobb's Journal, November, 2004]. Can you tell us please what got you started actually working on a solution to this problem?

Alan Dechert: I was a consultant for Sacramento County, California in 2000. When the election mess happened, I had an idea for building a better voting machine using commodity components and open source software. I wanted to employ the printed ballot architecture. You print out your ballot in our system, and that's what you vote with, that's what you take and put in the ballot box. That's one of the main pieces of my idea.

Another piece was adhering to the accessibility requirements for new voting equipment, I wanted to see one system, not one system for people who can't read, or who are blind, and another machine for normally sighted people.

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