Open Voting Consortium - Founding and Focus

Founding and Focus

An August 2008, San Francisco Chronicle article says that software engineer Alan Dechert was "outraged" that the results of the 2000 United States presidential election were thrown into confusion "because nobody could figure out how Florida's voters had voted" and this convinced him and a few like-minded colleagues to found OVC with the goal of delivering "trustable and open voting systems… In addition to lobbying against proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years working with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting machine of their own." Dechert told the newspaper that the OVC voting machine, based on the Linux operating system, could be certified for use by 2010.

Some of the group's early work included developing a system that would not be subject to the perceived security flaws in touch-screen voting machines, including those supplied by Diebold Election Systems (renamed Premier Election Solutions, acquired by Election Systems & Software), by creating a system that would allow voters to use a touchscreen while simultaneously producing a paper record. A 2004 Associated Press article grouped the OVC with the "harshest e-voting critics" and said it was pressuring voting machine companies to publish their software online, which OVC argued would lead to greater voter confidence and expose any flaws. "Open source is the only way to build robust systems that people can believe in," said Ed Cherlin, a software engineer and OVC member.