The San Francisco open source voting project

In 2016, the mayor and board of supervisors of the city and county of San Francisco approved a plan that would lead to the development of open source voting technology for San Franciscos elections. Tony Wasserman provides a progress report on the development of an open source voting system to replace San Francisco's existing proprietary paper ballot voting system.

In 2016, the mayor and board of supervisors of the city and county of San Francisco approved a plan that would lead to the development of open source voting technology for San Francisco’s elections. Funding of this project led initially to the award of a contract for a study of the associated issues and recommendations about how to develop and implement such a system. More recently, additional funding has permitted the city’s IT department to hire technical and management leadership to oversee the planning and implementation of the system with the San Francisco elections commissioner as project owner. Tony Wasserman explains that the project’s goal is to design and implement an open source paper ballot voting system, replacing the proprietary systems currently in use. If the project is successful, it would be the first such system anywhere. The effort is aided by an Open Source Voting Technical Advisory Committee (OSVTAC), whose members bring experience and knowledge of voting procedures, government agencies, contracting, software development processes, and open source software. The OSVTAC is subject to government “sunshine laws” and has followed open source processes in its work, with all of its materials and recommendations available. Recordings of the meetings are available on a YouTube channel. Tony provides details on the background of the open source voting project, an overview of other efforts, a description of the OSVTAC recommendations for the open source voting system, and an update on the project status.