Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday — a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems.

Many states are hastily implementing flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures.

Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I've been speaking in public about voting, I've discussed the need for voting systems' source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put another way, trade secrecy is anathema to election transparency.

"A new California study has found that several electronic voting machines have serious security vulnerabilities. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen commissioned the study which pitted two hacker teams, better known as “Red Teams” against voting machines manufactured by Diebold, Hart and Sequoia."

One of the most repeated examples cited to promote open source philosophy is that of an electronic voting system. If this process is not understood or transparent then its results cannot be trusted. The strength of this argument has gone up a hundredfold with the discovery that Diebold counting software has been missing ballots for four years.

As was just announced on the announcement mailing list*, the voting ballots for the Fedora 11 release name are now open. To vote, you just need to be a member of one non-CLA group in our Fedora Account System. Voting ends at 2359 UTC 2009-01-09, so get your vote in quickly! (There’s nothing wrong with campaigning for a name of your choice either, if you’re so inclined.)

A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.

As you will recall, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots - one to approve, with comments, and one to abstain, again with comments. The votes have now been received back. and are as follows:

Here in the states we are coming up on a very important election - the election of the President of the United States. And I would be remiss if I did not address this topic in a blog dedicated to the topic of open source.