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 [1], which has been on the NYS Board web site for some months now:

I initially suggested this to Commissioner 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
[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 [2]
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/August.2007/0039.html [3]
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/September.2007/0005.html [4]
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/November.2007/0217.html [5]