1: Public Trust
Address a serious problem in voting technology: the lack of open election technology that is demonstrably worthy of the public’s
trust.
Other Information:
Background -- 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.
Objective(s):
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