open-vote.org, openvotingconsortium.org, eVACS, and LWN discussion

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the Australian states has used eVACS Free software (GPL) for
a previous election and will use it again in November.

But the company that wrote it is now rewriting it, and making
it proprietary (though perhaps still disclosing the code?).  They're
creating confusion by using the same name.

 http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/08/19/0652240

A new non-profit, the Open Vote Foundation, http://open-vote.org/ is
taking the original Free eVACS code and undertaking

 "an open source effort to develop free software for Direct Recording
 Electronic (DRE) voting machines. Based on the Australian System,
 where source code is freely published for public review, the Open
 Vote Project's initial goals are to make a touchscreen voting system
 fully compatible with California election law, including a voter
 verifiable receipt and easy access for the disabled."

There is a good discusion of all this at the Linux Weekly News site:

 http://lwn.net/Articles/98671/

This is all separate from the Open Voting Consortium which is also
developing open source software for voting, and with which voting guru
Douglas Jones is involved:

     http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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