Date: February 6th, 2008

Dear Friends of Open Voting:

Slowly but surely, the dream of a modern voting system that is fully open to public scrutiny is coming into being. All the pieces are falling into place. I still can't announce the commercial vendor going with open source, but it is happening very soon -- Vendor X, let's say. I have seen the Vendor X's open source product and it's the best and least expensive system on the market now. It has already been submitted for federal certification and may even be used in several states as soon as NOV 2008!

Right now we have some conference presentations that are in the works. One of the bigger ones will be the Linuxworld conference (San Francisco) in August, and there are several other important events this spring. We need your support so we can follow through and keep the Open Voting movement advancing.

When we receive the signed membership form (and check!) and the code, it will mark a very important milestone. It's not so much that everyone will buy their system. Some will buy it, but it's mainly an important precedent. There will be more open source voting products to follow.

By the way, you can download [1] our current demo disk and try it out. You need to know how to burn a CD and you need to know how to boot your PC from the disk. If you need help, let me know. I can mail you a disk and, if necessary, walk you through setting your PC to boot from CD.

There are two other open source voting products seriously in the works, although we don't have the money for certification. Namely, Open Voting Solutions (OVS) has a precinct based optical scan system and Open Voting Consortium (OVC) has an Electronic Ballot Printer (EBP) system [2].

So, yes, things are falling into place. But the money is not here yet. Again, we need your help to keep the OVC project going. I may get a big membership check next week, but I have the $12,000-by-March goal in place just in case. I have many meetings with election officials scheduled beginning next week. I will have the new demo disk by then, which will look much more like a commercial product (including much better voter interface and have much higher capacity bar code: 2-d instead of 1-d). They will want it, but I need to some money to keep going to make this happen. I will also be shopping this disk to potential funders for certification.

We still have the $12,000 by March goal that I set Jan 7th. I am now setting an interim goal of $9,000 by tomorrow 4:00 pm, because I need that to pay our bills. All the money received so far has been applied to expenses.

We are having some problems with our website and have moved to a new host -- you may find more glitches than usual for a while. openvotingconsortium.org email hasn't been working. ANOTHER ISSUE: The box on the right of our web page that has the announcement signup and the fundraising drive information appears at the bottom of the page if you are using Internet Explorer (looks fine with Firefox). So, please scroll down to the bottom of the page.

PLEASE DONATE NOW
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Our supporters have come through when necessary. Around the first week of last month, I said we needed $3,000 to continue. Because of the support we received, we were able to follow through with the very public San Luis Obispo demonstration of our open voting technology. Literally, if we had not received this support, the OVC project could not have continued. Your support means everything to the Open Voting Consortium. We need a similar amount now. We've raised almost $6,000 toward the $9,000 goal we need to reach tomorrow.

Please go to the OVC web site and click on the donate button now. OVC can only be successful with your continued support.

Thank you and best wishes.

Alan Dechert
http://openvoting.org
9560 Windrose Lane
Granite Bay, CA 95746
dechert@gmail.com
916-772-5360

p.s.., If you have any trouble with our web site, please contact me immediately If necessary, you can put a check in the mail. But we still prefer PayPal because we get it right away and this is an emergency.
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[1] http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ad/ovcdemo.iso

[2]
The advantage of using any old 5-year-old PC and printer is that the hardware will continually get better and cheaper. All the other systems require expensive dedicated hardware that gets more and more dinosaur-looking every year. Maryland is finally getting rid of the Diebold TS (we symbolically smashed last year). MD spent over $100 million on that junk. With the OVC system, there is no need for huge buys followed a few years later with huge recycling and huge new purchases.

Of course, the OVC system could be used on dedicated hardware. We will continue to look at that, but the hardware will have to be very inexpensive to make any sense. When I started out thinking about this architecture, every PC came with a big heavy CRT monitor. Now, they are all coming with lightweight LCD panels.

Another way in which the pieces are falling into place: Early on, we were thinking about booting from a CD with no hard drive. This was always a possibility, but a whole lot of programming work was necessary to make this practical. Now, the Linux/opensource community has done this work for us (especially Knoppix and Ubuntu -- we use Ubuntu).