Date: February 27th, 2008

Dear Friends of Open Voting:

The New York State Board of Elections took an important step toward establishing a public voting system based on public software. Today, they passed a resolution that gives a break on examination fees to vendors that apply for certification of voting systems that use free open source software.

Here's the resolution, which has beed on the NYS Board web site for some months now:
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/NYSBOE/hava/Voting_Machines/ProposedResolutionConcerningFeesForTesting.pdf

I initailly suggested this to Comissioner Douglas Kellner back in June of last year. It took lots of steps and some persistence, but we got it done. Thanks to Doug Kellner! Professor Richard Johnson of Open Voting Solutions deserves a lot of credit, too: he wrote a letter to the board to get things rolling [1].

Thanks to all for your support to make open voting a reality.

Alan Dechert
http://openvoting.org
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[1] here are some posts I made to our discussion list that give an idea of how this happened:
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/July.2007/0002.html
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/August.2007/0039.html
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/September.2007/0005.html
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/November.2007/0217.html