January 1, 2009
Open Voting Consortium
This systems seems really good. You cast your vote using a computer, but the computer prints out a paper document. This prevents the ambiguity that inevitably occurs when users directly fill out paper ballots, such as when a voter fills in one circle by mistake and then puts an X through it. The resulting paper ballot shows the choices the voter made and includes a bar code for optical scanning. The software is entirely open source. It uses off-the-shelf, inexpensive components.
By the way, open source paper ballots is the leading idea in the Tech Policy section of Change.org’s contest.
