The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections.

We are currently developing free voting software to run on very inexpensive PC hardware. The OVC voting system will accommodate different languages and scoring methods, as well as voters with special needs.

We expect to be fully operational by 2005, with the certification of version 1.0 of the Open Voting software. Meanwhile, we have demonstration software under development at EVM2003, which should be ready in early 2004.

If you want to help make it happen, then send us email.

Visitors should feel free to create an account, submit a story, or join in the many discussions by posting comments. Members can also subscribe to a daily email newsletter of updated site content.

For more information about us, consult our FAQ.

This site is in its infancy, so be sure to check back often to see what's new.

Submitted by Laird Popkin on December 19, 2003 - 9:23pm.

Direct Recording Electronic, or more simply electronic voting machines which tabulate your vote electronically. DRE machines are part of a mandate by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) to provide federal funds for the replacement of traditional punch card voting machines.

A lot of controversy has been raised about the trustworthyness of DREs after many independant sources have found them to be vulnerable to a wide range of problems ranging from security problems to lack of auditability to the lack of a voter verifiable paper ballot.

Submitted by Laird Popkin on December 19, 2003 - 8:46pm.

I notice that you have participants from Europe, India, etc. Why would anyone outside the U.S. be so interested in helping to improve the voting system in the United States of America?

Thanks for asking. This question is a bit loaded and I think some aspects may be more-than-obvious. But I would like to advance at least two aspects:

1) The OVC is being set up from the outset as an International Consortium. We seek to produce a universal inexpensive voting machine that could work with any language and any scoring method in use any where in the world. Democracy has to be affordable. So, even though our intitial market will be

Submitted by Laird Popkin on December 19, 2003 - 8:44pm.

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