February 28, 2017

CAVO Continues to Advance Open Source for Democracy

OSI Affiliate Member, the California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO), has shared some exciting news regarding their advocacy work in San Francisco: according to the San Francisco Examiner, the city of San Francisco is pushing forward with plans to develop their open source election system. In addition, the paper is reporting that the San Francisco Elections Commission voted unanimously on Feb 17th to request $4 million to fund the initial stages of the open source voting system.

For many years board members of CAVO have been urging San Francisco to expedite, “the creation and deployment of a GPL v3 open source / paper ballot printing system that would set the standard for voting systems nationally.” According to CAVO, currently only New Hampshire has deployed a voting system using open source software, Prime III.

“We have been speaking with many members of the intelligence community regarding the immediate necessity of securing the election systems” states CAVO communications lead Brent Turner. “We feel we are finally breaking through the proprietary software lobbyist’s block that has delayed political will.”

CAVO reports San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Elections Commission, and community groups have directed the San Francisco Department of Elections to expedite the new open source system.

For more information regarding open source election systems – see www.cavo-us.org

CAVO Welcomes New Board Member

And in more open source elections news, Dr. Jean Camp has joined the California Association of Voting Officials and National Association of Voting Officials in their efforts to provide the election administration community with appropriately secure voting systems and election administration education.

Commenting on her appointment, Dr. Camp stated, “I am proud to serve on the California and national board. The work of this association is crucial to the integrity of our democracy.”

CAVO / NAVO has been the focus of national attention in questioning the validity of election results tendered by vendor sold “secret software” systems while advocating the benefits of publicly owned /open source voting systems.” Professor Camp is a great addition to our board,” said NAVO Secretary Brent Turner. “We look forward to her input.”

Jean Camp is a Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University (like CAVO, IU is also an OSI Affiliate Member). She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School where her courses were also listed in Harvard Law, Harvard Business, and the Engineering Systems Division of MIT. She spent the year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station and with a MSEE at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on the intersection of human and technical trust, levering economic models and human-centered design to create safe, secure systems. She is the author of two monographs. In addition, she has authored more than one hundred fifty publications.

Jean Camp joins other CAVO board member notables Dr. Juan Gilbert and Brian Fox to be part of the pioneering team.