Open Voting Consortium (OVC) Voting System

How does voting work with the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) system?

1. You vote at a touch screen voting station, similar to an ATM. This is known as a "Ballot Marking Device", and you indicate your choices of candidates and propositions.
2. The Ballot Marking Device both prints a paper ballot and also stores a permanent copy of your ballot on a CD. The paper ballot IS the official ballot; the copy on the CD is not official, just an aid in detecting fraud and other problems.
3. You read the ballot to verify that your choices were printed correctly. The ballot also contains a bar code that indicates your choices in machine-readable form.
4. You carry your paper ballot to a scanner and feed it in to the scanner. The scanner verifies your ballot is legal; e.g. it warns you if you voted for two many candidates for an office and tells you what offices and measures you skipped.
5. If you want, the scanner will read to you your choices and you can listen on headphones. This way even visiion impaired and limited English readers can verify that the ballot reflects their choices. If there is a problem, you can reject the ballot, go back to the Ballot Marking Device and start over again.
6. You put your paper ballot in a locked ballot box.

What makes the system better and more transparent?

1. The vote counting software is owned by the public, not by a private company.
2. There is no secret vote counting software. OVC's system uses open source software both for the voting machine, the scanning machine, and the counting machine, so that anyone with enough computer knowledge can examine the software and verify that the software will count votes accurately.
3. OVC's system includes multiple safety and auditing mechanisms:
   1. Paper ballots mean that voters can verify the correctness of their ballot and manual recounts can be done.
   2. Voters can check that the bar code is correct by having it scanned in and read back to them.
   3. An audit system between the ballot marking machine and the counting machine ensures that every vote is cast by an actual person, that all votes are accounted for, that all votes match on both the ballot marking machine and the counting machine (where the votes are scanned in from the paper ballots) and that the total number of votes counted matches the total number of votes cast.
   4. Various security mechanisms protect the software and the machines on which it runs. For more information on security, see the Open Voting FAQ at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/faq

Why is it better than paper ballots, hand counted?

1. An entirely paper system with manual vote counting doesn't prevent cheating. Quite to the contrary, the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City in the 19th and 20th centuries is one example in history of notoriously fraudulent elections using a completely paper system long before the advent of electronic voting.
2. The OVC system has multiple checks that a paper system can't have. It checks the number of votes cast against the number of voters. It ensures that each vote matches a vote cast by a real voter. This prevents activities like ballot box stuffing and vote discarding to which paper systems are vulnerable.
3. The OVC system is also more accessible to disabled people than a paper-only system. For example, a blind person could vote a secret ballot without assistance and listen to the ballot using headphones to verify their vote.

The Problem

"In November of 2000, about 12 percent of the ballots in America were invisible, created with secret software. In 2002, it was about 18 percent. In 2004, over 30 percent of the ballots in America were invisible.

That's more than 30 million invisible ballots created with secret software in the most recent and controversial election!"

Right now, 80 percent of all votes in this country are counted by two companies: Diebold, and ES & S. The Vice President of Diebold and the president of ES & S are brothers. And the chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush supporter who vowed this past presidential election to deliver the electronic votes to Bush.

As Congressman Pete King (R-NY) put it on Oct. 11, 2004,

"It's already over. The election's over. We won. It's all over but the counting. And well take care of the counting."

(This is adapted from emails by Laura Perkins and Colleen O'Brien)