Open Source Digital VotingOSDV FoundationOSDVFWe’re a non-profit public benefits corporation led by a group of social entrepreneurs dedicated to sustaining technology development efforts that create freely available, open source U.S. election technology. See http://osdv.org/_7197ca02-0909-11df-999e-bc6f7a64ea2aTo create publicly owned transparent, trustworthy voting technology for any U.S. elections jurisdiction._7197cc1e-0909-11df-999e-bc6f7a64ea2aPublic TrustAddress a serious problem in voting technology: the lack of open election technology that is demonstrably worthy of the public’s trust.1Background -- The social entrepreneurs behind this effort firmly believe that U.S. voting systems and related technology is tantamount to “critical democracy infrastructure,” and as such it must be completely transparent and publicly owned. Our long term goal is a sustainable public benefits organization with an endowment to continue the efforts to accomplish this mission. The Foundation’s flagship effort to accomplish its mission, the TrustTheVote Project, is addressing a serious problem in voting technology: the lack of open election technology that is demonstrably worthy of the public’s trust. While the Foundation mission includes developing open source guidelines and design specifications for U.S. elections systems technology, the focus is on actually creating production-ready, Federally and State certified, voting systems. Importantly, while white papers are produced occasionally to inform the work, the OSDV Foundation is not a think-tank, lobbying organization, or activist. Instead, the Foundation supports efforts to build voting technology that anyone can see, touch, and try. And there will never be any commercial or vendor intent on the part of the Foundation in that regard. The range of efforts to accomplish the mission span the entire elections and voting ecosystem including voter registration, ballot design, voting devices, and election management services, best described in this overview. The OSDV Foundation’s mission is carried out by a staff who co-ordinates the activities of a volunteer community of technology and policy experts in the computer technology sector including members of academia, commercial, and public administration segments. The kernel of this staff is a small full-time Core Development Team comprised of highly experienced technologists serving as architects and project leads. The OSDV Foundation mission is executed under an open source mandate, meaning all work is done through a collaborative, open volunteer community to ensure complete transparency, public review, comment and participation. The results of this work are intended to include publicly vetted, peer-reviewed proposed draft standards for building, verifying, and using digital voting technology — and freely available reference implementations in the form of production-ready systems for managing elections and conducting voting. Our domain, for the foreseeable future, is U.S. elections processes and jurisdictions. We are mindful, however, that success with American voting systems can potentially inform other democracies worldwide. Summary -- We believe the OSDV is a breakthrough organization bringing together the best and brightest in technology and policy into a synergistic, meritocratic community focused on designing and developing guidelines and specifications for high assurance digital voting services. A hallmark distinction between OSDV and other similar efforts is what the OSDV does not do: OSDV has no interest in lobbying, political advocacy, or being a change force in election reform outside of making technology that anyone can see, touch and try (which may well inform the conversation.) Instead, OSDV supports the real work to define and build the next generation of election technology that’s needed in order to — for the first time ever — simultaneously [1] meets the actual operational needs of U.S. elections organizations, and [2] delivers the means for operational transparency and public trust in both the technology itself, and in its use to conduct elections.Trust the Vote ProjectMake demonstrative progress by the 2010 mid-term national elections, delivering applicable, actionable, and useful results for some of the “choke points” that currently exist in the efficient running of elections with current proprietary solutions.1.1TrustTheVote™ (TTV) is the flagship project of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) for its mission to re-invent how America votes in a digital democracy. The TTV project has an ambitious and aggressive road map, schedule, and projected deliverables that can be “seen, touched, and tried.” However, we are realistic about the size of the undertaking, and the challenges of adoption for the resulting technology trust. The project has a mandate to make demonstrative progress by the 2010 mid-term national elections, delivering applicable, actionable, and useful results for some of the “choke points” that currently exist in the efficient running of elections with current proprietary solutions. These areas the Foundation seeks to impact by 2010 include: voter registration, ballot design, ballot tabulation and auditing. The TTV project is a digital public works project, creating freely available, non-proprietary technology that is maintained as a public trust. Open source technology and practices are a key aspect of a public works project, and a critical ingredient in the TTV recipe for creating public trust in election technology, via technologically enabled transparency. TTV’s approach to transparency is to be an enabler for “open government” in U.S. elections, a first-ever demonstration that election technology can capture all the details of all the digital processes of election, and publish these details so that the public can see exactly what public servants are doing in pursuit of the public’s business of operating elections._7197cd18-0909-11df-999e-bc6f7a64ea2a_7197ce44-0909-11df-999e-bc6f7a64ea2a_7197cf34-0909-11df-999e-bc6f7a64ea2aThe basic mechanics of elections must be easily understandable to the entire electorate, and comprehensible by anyone with an average intelligence commensurate with the age of voting eligibility, including voting, counting, canvassing, re-counting, and creating election results. Therefore, the complexity of any technology that provides for any of these basic mechanics must be sufficiently abstracted to a point where their operation is comprehensible by this same audience.ComprehensionAny use of digital voting technology must be solely for the purpose of automating a part of an election system or process that is already in place and well-understood in principle.3PurposeAny digital voting component must be embodied in a specific device that is defined for a specific purpose in an existing election system.SpecificityDevices must be designed for application that is compatible with existing processes and procedures, without requiring technology-driven changes that can undermine comprehension and confidence.CompatibilityDevices must be readily assessable for their veracity; this means it performs all (and only) its required functions, with a very high degree of integrity and resistance to inadvertent change, or tampering, or fraud.AssuranceDevices must be able to be easily subjected to an independent certification process void of any vendor advice, direction, influence, instruction, or participation, including meeting assurance assessments by the state or local election officials that procure and operate digital voting technology.CertificationEach certified high-assurance device must be able to be used in a transparent manner of conducting elections, where the processes and results of the election are transparent, auditable, replicable (for either recount or audit), and publicly available.TransparencyOwenAmburOwen.Ambur@verizon.net2010-01-24http://osdv.org/background