
San Francisco could lead on open-source voting - willow9886
http://www.sfexaminer.com/san-francisco-could-lead-on-open-source-voting/
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philipn
The caption on the image ("If San Francisco moves forward in developing an
open source voting system, paper ballots could be a thing of the past") is
incorrect. The open-source voting plan has nothing to do with getting rid of
paper ballots. Paper ballots will stick around.

San Francisco's election process has many distinct pieces, some of which
currently involve software. For instance, the optical scanning machines that
scan paper ballots run software. With this proposal, these machines will run
open-source software.

The proposal isn't for a new electronic voting system (e.g. electronic voting
machines), or to rid the city of paper ballots. It's just to improve the
existing process.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Here's a better idea:

Get rid of electronic voting entirely.

It's an incredibly hard security problem that hasn't been solved. Making the
software open-source is putting lipstick on a pig.

(Somewhat reassuringly, a slim majority of the readers of the article agree
with me: [http://i.imgur.com/k5OZ7vB.png](http://i.imgur.com/k5OZ7vB.png))

~~~
Houshalter
Electronic voting is already widely in use. I've never voted on a paper
ballot.

And it makes some really cool voting systems possible. For example, you can do
Condorcet voting systems, which are far superior to normal first past the
post. Or cool systems like single transferable vote for electing groups of
representatives.

These systems are much harder to do manually and with paper ballots, but
trivial to do electronically.

~~~
stonesixone
San Francisco uses both paper ballots and single transferable voting (in its
single-winner, instant runoff voting form). Indeed, I believe all
jurisdictions in the United States that use STV also use paper ballots.

In San Francisco, voters vote on paper ballots, and the ballots are
electronically scanned. This generates a digital representation of the
rankings cast on all ballots, which can be fed into tabulation software. SF
actually releases these rankings publicly as a text file for each contest. See
here, for example:

[http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail](http://www.sfelections.org/results/20151103/#english_detail)

~~~
Houshalter
Yes it's the vote tallying machine that needs to be electronic, not
necessarily the ballot that the voter fills out.

But even then, it's harder to do ranked paper ballots. Presumably someone has
to transcribe the numbers voters wrote on the ballot into a computer, which
introduces room for mistakes and lots of work.

~~~
thwarted
None of that requires manually transcribing numbers. Here's what the ranked
paper ballot looks like that we use in SF. This is entirely scanable by
machine.

[http://californiawatch.org/files/imagecache/image-full-
width...](http://californiawatch.org/files/imagecache/image-full-width/Ranked-
choice-voting-sample-ballot_0.jpg)

Notice that it says (hard to read in this image) in the second and third
choice that the selection must be different from the other choices.

~~~
Houshalter
Ah, interesting way of doing it. Still a bit messy, and the size of the ballot
could grow quadratically with the number of candidates.

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pzone
Hell yes. This is totally amazing.

The beauty of developing an open-source voting platform is that it can be
reproduced throughout the country, even throughout the world. All that was
necessary was for someone to pay for it and use it.

Thank you San Francisco for being rich enough and wacky enough to make the
world a slightly better place.

~~~
stonesixone
Thanks, pzone! Yes, that's the idea: affordability, modifiability, etc. Stay
tuned to next week's Elections Commission meeting for more on this. ;)

[http://sfgov.org/electionscommission](http://sfgov.org/electionscommission)

PS - I'm the President of the SF Elections Commission.

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Dowwie
"The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2007) counted 39,044
general purpose local governments, which includes 19,492 municipal
governments, 16,519 township governments and 3.033 county governments."

San Francisco tax payers do not need to carry the entire financial burden for
an open source project that could benefit so many other governments.
Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.

~~~
stonesixone
> Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.

In theory, that sounds nice. But keep in mind that introducing more
stakeholders also has significant downsides.

For example, government organizations are complicated, slow-moving beasts, so
introducing more governments would likely slow things even more. Parts of San
Francisco government first expressed interest in open source voting systems
over eight years ago, and we are still in the "discussion" phase!

Introducing more stakeholders also increases the likelihood of scope creep on
an already ambitious project, because other jurisdictions have their own
interests, requirements, and priorities. I believe this is the main reason
that Los Angeles County hasn't shown interest in partnering with other
counties on their own voting system project [1] (VSAP, a project that may or
may not turn out to be open source). It also introduces the question of how
such a partnership would be governed.

Basically, it is politically challenging enough to get even one jurisdiction
on board. So I would lean towards establishing such a partnership or
organization to coordinate and maintain improvements only after an initial
system is built and working.

[1] [https://www.lavote.net/vsap](https://www.lavote.net/vsap)

------
dang
Url changed from [http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-
compan...](http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-
companies/102715/san-francisco-considers-pioneering-open-source-voting-mac),
which points to this.

