What is Open Voting?

You will know when open voting has been fully implemented when all aspects of election administration are open to public scrutiny. Right now, it is not the case. Important aspects of the process of collecting and counting our votes require that we simply trust officials and corporations that run the process.

Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is perhaps the best known exponent of open voting. OVC is involved in political activites — like sponsoring and lobbying for legislation and promoting candidates for office that support open voting. Open Voting Foundation (OVF), on the other hand, focuses more on non-political issues related to implementation of open voting.

The Open Voting Foundation supports the development of open software and standards for vote capture and tabulation in the spirit of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Such products will allow your community to own and maintain its voting systems. Today, 3 large voting machine companies own, maintain and control most of the electronic voting machines in the country. The standards that hold these companies accountable to the people are almost non-existent, that is, the private firms are assumed trustworthy and immune from corruption. Their products are also immune to public scrutiny.

Because of rules governing voting machines, it is note entirely possible for open vote capture and tabulation machines to fall under the free software definition.

See our problem statement to learn about problems with the current voting systems.