Imagine instead of the headline above we saw a different headline: "NH leads the nation in eliminating unconstitutional concealed computerized vote counting". The NH Secretary of State and the NH Legislature both had the chance to make it happen in 2006, when NH Fair Elections Committee-endorsed legislation that would have prohibited concealed vote counting was brought to the newly elected Democratic majority in the House.

The NH Constitution states clearly that the vote count must be sorted and counted in open meeting. Under the watchful eyes of the public. The Voting Rights Act states clearly that the vote count must be observable. Federal rules prohibit outsourcing of governmental functions that support the continuation of government (like counting the votes). Nonetheless, New Hampshire outsources nearly 90% of its vote count, which is then conducted using computers that conceal the vote count from public observation. It is physically impossible for electronic vote counting to meet the constitutional mandate for open vote counting. The human eye can not see a computer program counting votes. It does not matter if the software is open source or proprietary. The human eye can not see the inner workings of a computer program in action.

Now, NH is cited in the article below as being interested in "open source" vote counting technology. This is a direct consequence of the policies and practices of the office of the NH Secretary of State, which has approved unconstitutional computerized voting now used in the majority of the state's elections, and which has collaborated with the legislature to enforce and perpetuate unconstitutional concealed vote counting by computers.

But mostly, this is a direct consequence of the people of New Hampshire letting these folks get away with giving away our democracy.

When many DFNH-endorsed candidates were elected in 2006, I held out hope that they would help the NH legislature to address the problem of unconstitutional voting technology, which conceals the vote count from public observation. Unfortunately, this was not to be. With the exception of former Representative Betty Hall, DFNH-endorsed candidates on the Election Law committee turned away from the principles embodied in the DFNH mission statement: "DFNH works to protect the foundations of our democracy and the integrity of our political process."

Instead, they went along with Election Law Chair Jane Clemons' (d-Nashua) plan to kill legislation that would have supported the constitutional mandate for open vote counting. They instead passed a bill forming an e-voting committee, adding one more brick to the wall between voters and the vote count.

Computerized vote counts are unconstitutional and must be eliminated from our elections. Don't believe the lies that "open source" computerized vote counting is okay. You can not watch the vote count when it is done by a computer program. Germany banned e-voting as unconstitutional. We must do the same.

We can't count on the NH Secretary of State or the Legislature to do the responsible thing and eradicate concealed vote counting. We the people have to do it ourselves. And one way or another, we will.

SOURCE: Wired.com

Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released

By Kim Zetter

LOS ANGELES — 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.

LOS ANGELES — 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.

The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) announced the availability of source code for its prototype election system Wednesday night at a panel discussion that included Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; California Secretary of State Debra Bowen; Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan; and Heather Smith, director of Rock the Vote.

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

“How we vote has become just as important as who we vote for,” Miller told the audience of filmmakers and technologists who gathered at the Bel-Air home of film producer Lawrence Bender to hear about the project. “We think it is imperative that the infrastructure on which we cast and count our ballots is an infrastructure that is publicly owned.”

Miller said the foundation wasn’t looking to put voting system companies out of business but to assume the heavy burden and costs of research and development to create a trustworthy system that will meet the needs of election officials for reliability and the needs of the voting public for accessibility, transparency, security and integrity.

“We believe we’re catalyzing a re-birth of the industry … by making the blueprint available to anyone who wants to use it,” Miller said.

The foundation has elicited help from academics and election officials from eight states as well as voter advocacy groups, such as Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, to guide developers in building the system. Technology bigwigs such as Oracle, Sun and IBM have also approached the group to help with the project.

“That was unexpected,” Miller said.

The code currently available for download and review represents only a small part of the total code and includes parts of an online voter registration portal and tracking system, election management software and a vote tabulator. Prototype code for producing ballots has been completed and will be posted soon. Code for auditing is still being designed.

The voting firmware and tabulator program are built on a minimized Linux platform (a stripped down version of Sharp) and the election management components are built with Ruby on Rails.

The foundation already has California, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington interested in adopting the system and is in talks with 11 other states. Florida, which has been racked by voting machine problems since the 2000 presidential debacle, has also expressed interest, as has Georgia, which uses machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) statewide.

“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said.

The foundation is especially interested in getting a system that would be workable in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest and most complex election district with 4.3 million voters casting ballots in seven languages.

“If Los Angeles County figures this out, we will have solved the problems for the rest of the country,” Miller said.

Kapor called the project “a breath of fresh air” and said it symbolized the kind of “disruptive innovation” that has characterized all of the best technological developments over the last thirty years.