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Everyone deserves a better, safer, more trustworthy voting experience.

TrustTheVote® Project

Our members are a powerful force for open innovation in public election technology. One of the very most important ways to get involved with the work of the Institute is to join the TrustTheVote Project.

  • First it means to become a member of the movement to “trust the vote” –and advocate for public voting technology that is verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent.

    Second, it means making a contribution in the form of an annual subscription that is fully tax deductible, depending on your circumstances–100% of the funds go to the costs to finish developing the public voting system called “ElectOS” and submitting that technology for state and federal certification.

    Third, it means joining the growing chorus of individuals, primarily American citizens, but since we’re working globally it can be from anyone anywhere in the world who is “pro democracy.” This movement is advocating for transparency in voting technology, guarantees of certain rights of participation, and moving away from commercial proprietary voting systems to open transparent, publicly-owned voting systems based on the TrustTheVote Project’s ElectOS technology.

  • In essence you bring your tax-deductible contribution and your voice–whether in person or online, and we have the development team that has done all the design and engineering work and now simply needs to get it built and certified.

  • As a member of the Project, your name will be digitally etched into the master software source code that will be permanently housed as a public asset at the U.S. National Archives. Kewl, eh?

Election Day Volunteers

VOLUNTEER

We have been working since 2006 with a single goal of increasing confidence in elections and their outcomes. The success of our mission depends on participation from people like you.

 
  • Our objective is simple: offer truly innovative open-source, publicly available software for elections administration and voting that is higher integrity, lower cost, and easier to use for voters and officials alike. Here is how we get this done:

    • We want to offer real innovation for what is essentially critical democracy infrastructure, and that innovation is not something that the government or the commercial sector can or will do on its own.

    • The underlying technology is too vital to our democracy to make it closed and proprietary. Thus, this public digital works project to make ElectOS.

    • We want the commercial industry to build finished voting systems based on our open-standards, open-data, open-source software we call "ElectOS."

    • Our goal is to reinvigorate that industry by removing the "heavy lifting" of election technology research, development and innovation—activities that simply don't "pencil out" in today's commercial voting systems business models.

    • That’s where we come in. And “we” includes you: the success of our mission depends on participation from people like you.

    Learn how you can get involved or support the TrustTheVote Project to help make a difference in the process of American democracy—and eventually help all democracies worldwide!

  • We need your unique skills...

    Stakeholder
    If you are an elections official, administrator, director, or elections systems expert, we're especially interested in hearing from you. If you would like to learn more about how this digital public works project can benefit you and your jurisdiction or you are interested in learning more about the TrustTheVote Project Stakeholder Community, please contact us directly by eMail to: stakeholders at osetinstitute dot org or use the Form to the right here and check the box "Stakeholder Community"

    Testing & QA
    Quality assurance testing is one of the simplest ways to get started with TrustTheVote and its a great way to learn about our software technology, while helping us hunt down bugs.

    Coding Developers
    You can help TrustTheVote® in many ways depending on your capabilities and experience. Tell us your favorite programming language and development environments and we'll match you with a framework component.

    Outreach
    Help us spread the word about how TrustTheVote Project and other OSET Institute activities are helping reinvent how America votes in a digital age. We have all kinds of marketing and promotional initiatives forming and underway.

    Web Development
    Our web properties are in need of continual innovation and update. If you hack WordPress, know the SquareSpace platform, are down with Java, Javascript, PHP, and the latest responsive web design tools get at us..

    Writing
    Are you a technical writer? We’re building a library of RFCs (Request for Comments); we prepare grant apps; we develop white papers, presentations, and other educational materials; we document our code. If you know your prepositional phrases from fragments, please consider being a part of some history-making here.

    Research
    Are you nosey by nature? Do you have a thirst for trivia, a natural curiosity, enjoy history, or love uncovering answers to conundrums? We continually need to track down information, compile data, and build a clearer picture of how elections work (or don’t) in the U.S.

    Visual Design
    We’re continually looking for those who “get” user experience and visual design. We have continuing needs in both areas; the former to help our interactive design team with the work of developing citizen-facing voting and elections information apps, and the latter for illustration projects, and brand work of all kinds. If you tend to agree with the views of Dieter Rams, Hugh Dubberly, Alan Cooper, or Sir Jony Ive, then we should talk.

Fill out the Volunteer Application below to learn how you can get involved to help make a difference in the process of American democracy—and eventually help all democracies worldwide!

SUPPORT THE INSTITUTE

Whether an individual, family, a philanthropy, or corporation, supporting the OSET Institute is a pro-democracy statement and effort to ensure the availability of critical public election administration technology infrastructure that is verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent.

 
  • Your tax-deductible support can take several forms:

    • Annual grants of funding to complete ElectOS software development, and on-going code curation

    • Contributions of hardware and software necessary on which to build and bench ElectOS

    • In-kind contributions of developer resources

    • Gifts of stock transfers to help fund Institute operations

  • Why Support the Open Source Election Technology Institute?

    Your contribution supports OSET Institute initiatives such as TrustTheVote.org, and salaries for full-time fellows and staff architects, engineers, and developers.

    Your contribution supports our collaboration with other critical infrastructure sectors in critical hardware and software security research, and facilitates our cybersecurity advisory education services to the election administration profession.

    Your contribution supports essential IP protection work for open source election technology to preserve and protect its continued public availability, and supports other essential legal work to ensure the availability and quality (licensing, export controls, etc.) of all our election technology projects made available to any democracy administrator worldwide.

    Your support enables the OSET Institute to operate as a global organization with operations spanning the United States, Latin America, European Union, United Kingdom, and Asia democracies.

    Your support also enables us to collaborate with important University research projects related to critical infrastructure as it applies to election administration and related research on democracy administration at institutions such as U.C. Berkeley, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, NYU, Georgia Institute of Technology, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Stanford, USC, and others.

  • Contact US to learn more about supporting the work of the OSET Institute, or you can use our online form or our stock transfer agent.