Re: Move to North Dakota if you really want a secret ballot, or ....

Steve,

> I've been busy. OVC is at most 6th (if not lower) on my list of
> priorities.
>
Fair enough. Sixth is not bad.

> >I think it is essential to reason about the whole process of voting.
Making
> >the software for the voting machine is important, but, imo, there's a lot
> >more we have to think about assuming we're interested in transitioning to
> >the best voting system possible (where "voting system" does not equal
> >"voting machine").
>
> I have no problem if you want to reason about the process of voting,
> but I didn't think that that was the purpose of this list. (If it is,
> I'll happily unsubscribe.)
>

>From our Bylaws:

     (a) Vision and Mission: Our vision is a world
     in which voting systems are inexpensive, readily
     available, reliable, easy to use, accessible,
     universal, transparent, auditable, and produce
     verifiable election results. Our mission is to
     develop, maintain, and deliver a universal open
     voting system for use in public elections.

Generally, imo, the purpose of the list is to discuss things that support
the vision and mission of the OVC. Again, "voting system" does not equal
"voting machine." So discussions have been pretty wide-ranging. I note that
Doug Jones initiated a change to the mission statement that appears on our
home page but is not reflected in the Bylaws. Partly, that's because it's
harder to change the bylaws (we need a board meeting or some formal
procedure to do that and we have been a little behind on such things). Doug
wanted "universal open voting systems" rather than "universal open voting
system."

> Later posts on this thread have suggested that OVC work on a voter
> registration database. I see that as on-topic (even if mission-creep),
> since it's about equipment. But a discussion as to whether voting
> registration is necessary or desirable seems off-topic.
>
I wouldn't call it "off-topic." I would call it on-topic but low priority.
It's not something we can tackle right away. Most every aspect of the
voting system is on-topic discussion. Voter registration causes voter
disenfranchisement. So, we're concerned about that. Holes in the voter
registration system are routinely exploited to disenfranchise voters. No
voter was ever enfranchised by the voter registration system. Voter
registration only serves to disenfranchise voters--some more than others. A
most insidious form of this involves targeting voters that are your
opponents by sending in false registration forms for them from a county out
side their county of residence. That way, re-registered targets go to the
polls and find they are not registered. They can vote a provisional ballot
but it will most likely be thrown out (voters are not informed if their
provisional ballot was accepted--most are not).

I discussed some of these registration issues in my talk last year at UCSC.
Among other things, I stated that Election Day registration should be
universal. That's my opinion.
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ContentFrame/oct26forum.html

I also mentioned sortion in my talk. I don't consider that off-topic
either--just something we're not going to get involved with right away. If
someone wants to talk about sortion, I'm glad to do that. People that see
that as way out there don't need to get involved in that discussion. So
far, no takers on sortion--no cause for concern right now either.

> As an analogy, it seems on-topic to discuss how EVM can support
> cumulative voting and IRV and Pairwise and Borda etc. But it seems
> off-topic to discuss whether a jurisdiction should use cumulative
> voting or IRV or Pairwise or Board or etc., and even more off-topic to
> discuss which one is best.
>
Scoring neutrality is correct but it is not really analogous. We decided to
support all scoring methods but remain neutral on which ones should be used.
Arnie Urken was pretty vocal on this point early on (before the
voting-project list was established.. i.e., when it was an informal list of
4 or so which grew to 12 and then Arthur put it on a listserve). In other
words, what you have stated is the policy we decided to adopt. No one ever
effectively argued otherwise on this point.

Alan D.
==================================================================
= The content of this message, with the exception of any external
= quotations under fair use, are released to the Public Domain
==================================================================
Received on Tue Aug 31 23:17:11 2004