News & Insights

We’re Making History in Real Time.

Our timely insights share informed perspectives on the rapidly evolving story of Election Technology, as it unfolds.

Announcing Collaboration to Produce Global Election Technology Industry Study

This week the Wharton School together with its Public Policy Institute and the OSET Foundation announced an important industry research project to further inform business, government, and philanthropy on the state of the global election technology industry.  The research team is comprised of two principal investigators: Dr. Lorin Hitt of Wharton and Gregory Miller of the OSET Foundation, leading six Wharton students, and managed by Andrew Coopersmith of the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative ...

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Gregory Miller Gregory Miller

A Solemn Day of Fighting the Good Fight

In the midst of our heads-down work and of the goodness in advancing the cause of innovation in critical democracy infrastructure, we pause

On December 14th, our Chief Technology Officer, John Sebes's Father, Dr. Jeno Sebes, passed away in Memphis, TN. Below is the obituary (courtesy of Barbara Coll, John's wife) that will be published in the paper tomorrow.

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I Totally Just Voted!
Commentary, Election Information, Risk Ms. Voting Matters Commentary, Election Information, Risk Ms. Voting Matters

I Totally Just Voted!

Ms. Voting Matters here, and I'm going to start spending more time sharing things with our readers here who couldn't care less about code (although it does cause change ;) but who, like myself, really care a bunch more about how we preserve our right to be a part of our democracy.  And for us, that means more easily and conveniently casting our ballot and knowing our ballots are counted as cast, right?  So for you, my thought today is about something that makes total sense on the one hand, and totally doesn't on the other... the voter selfie.  I went back and forth on this for days, reading various views from Vogue to the NY Times, and here is where I come down on this.  I hope you'll think about it, and reach a similar conclusion...

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Commentary, Open Source Gregory Miller Commentary, Open Source Gregory Miller

San Francisco Thinking Forward on Electoral Technology

Last month San Francisco issued a fast-tracked Request For Information ("RFI") to obtain insight, knowledge, and a reality check on the potential for adopting, adapting, and deploying a next generation voting system that is based on open source software technology.  We responded to the RFI. However, in the process, we unintentionally misrepresented the status of OSI review of our OSS license, which we've now corrected.  Read on about our licensing to ensure adoption of OSS election technology, and some comments about San Francisco's thought leadership in researching open source opportunities for electoral technology innovation.

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Hacking Elections: Opportunity Clicking

An emerging media outlet, Who.What.Why posted an article on Monday in their Threats to Democracy section that is totally worth reading.  Seriously.  When people think of election theft, most assume that amounts to somebody doing something to alter how ballots are cast or counted.  Apparently, we should start thinking bigger.

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Commentary, Open Source E. John Sebes Commentary, Open Source E. John Sebes

Repositories Update Continued: VoteStream Dominates

Today we provide another follow-up to our continuing report on our Repositories and source code development efforts.  As others of the Core team have mentioned when contributing posts to the OSET blog (verses the TrustTheVote Project Blog), we appreciate the audience is diversifying over here, and want to forewarn you that parts of what follow get kinda geeky but we try to provide links for those curious to learn more.  (Also Note: The TrustTheVote site is about to be re-launched within the next month, so we're trying to limit blog posts over there.) Anyway, we suspect what makes it geekish more than anything are code-names and acronyms.  We’ll try to minimize the alphabet soup. OK, here we go…

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Absentee Ballot Request, the Horatio Way

Today’s guest-blog is a follow-up to our continuing report on our Repositories and source code development efforts.  And it is from one of our source contributors, a well-respected government I.T. technologist, Waldo Jaquith.  Without further words, Waldo, take it away!

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A Hacked Case For Election Technology

A credible election technology company makes an incredible assertion, and the result is our CTO hot-in-pursuit of some intellectual honesty.  The good news: the conversation is growing on the emerging issue of America's crumbling election technology infrastructure.  The bad news: articles like the one reviewed by our CTO, particularly when published by a respectable online scientific journal create a "reality distortion field" resulting in "sound-bytes" that can mislead policy makers, politicians, and less informed pundits.  Result: degradation of the signal to noise ratio and a hacked case for election technology.  Read on, for a dose of intellectual honesty from our Chief election technologist...

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Reality Check: Cost of Software Development

Even philanthropic efforts to produce public benefits in the form of civic technology have real costs associated with software development.  The open source model, however, means the costs are significantly less than current proprietary commercial alternatives, while the innovative benefits, unconstrained by commercial mandates, can be significantly greater.  More importantly, there is some reality distortion over the real costs to building civic engagement IT, such as election administration and voting systems.  They are markedly different than many other civic engagement tools that require only APIs and interactive web services leveraging government data stores to better engage and serve citizens.  Tuesday's post by Ms. Voting Matters on our Voter Services Portal ignited comments and questions about the real cost to build the Voter Services Portal.  The VSP is not "yet another simple web site," but a collection of software to provide services to voters that integrate with back-end legacy systems, and set the foundation to drive a series of voter service innovations as well as other election management tools in the near future.  We breakdown the cost model and actual costs here...

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Voter Services Portal: Open Source Innovation

The Voter Services Portal component of the Open Source Election Technology Framework is a freely available highly extensible online voter registration platform that can cut the cost of States' and jurisdictions' custom development by as much as 75% and reduce the time to develop and deploy from months or more to merely a few weeks.  Why wouldn't any jurisdiction moving to online voter services strongly consider this freely available source code, open for innovation?  That's the whole point of our non-profit technology R&D effort: increase confidence in elections and their outcomes by offering technology innovations that can be easily adopted, adapted, and deployed.  Sure, there are costs associated with adaptation and deployment; after all, open source does not necessarily mean free source.  But the time and taxpayer dollars savings should make this an easy decision...

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Fighting for Democracy Means More Than Bearing Arms

On this 239th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, we find ourselves reflecting on the causes of democracy and the good and just fight to protect and preserve democracy--not only here in the United States of America, but globally.  The cause of the OSET Foundation, manifest in the TrustTheVote Project, is one important, arguably vital aspect of that good and just fight.  It is likewise important to illustrate that fighting for our democracy means more than bearing arms.

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Making Elections Data Open Data: The Sequel

Today, members of the Core Team are in Vail, Colorado at the IACREOT Conference to unveil the next phase of VoteStream, the elections results and reporting subsystem of our Open Source Election Technology Framework.  This is an awesome day, and we owe a great deal of thanks to the Knight Foundation for continuing to support this important part of the Framework.

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NCSL Convenes Policy & Election Technology Summit

NCSL Conference on Policy and Elections Technology is in full swing in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Our Chief Development Officer is set to participate in an interesting panel on the future of elections technology in a post-HAVA funded world.  We have a position document responding to several questions posed to us in advance of the conference available for download...

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OSET Foundation Comments "Key" to USPTO Service Announcement

Intellectual property is a key ingredient to our work.  Monitoring developments relevant to that work is important. Suggestions we urged the USPTO to consider in order to improve 3rd party submission of prior art and crowd-sourcing prior art appear to have been adopted with their recent announcement of a new Patent Application Alert System.  This is will be a very useful tool for us and many.  We applaud the USPTO and are humbled they appear to have fully adopted our comments.

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Announcements, Commentary Ms. Voting Matters Announcements, Commentary Ms. Voting Matters

Launch of New Election Technology Forum

The Foundation announces launch of new election technology news and information channel, Election Technology News (Election-Tech), an eMail listserv forum (with full RSS-syndication support) available to elections professionals everywhere, supported and managed by the OSET Foundation, and powered by ListBox and Attensa.

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