This article is more than 1 year old

San Francisco prepares to open source its voting system software

Will it be the first in the nation to do so in 2019?

Not lacking in expertise

And noting that the San Francisco Bay Area is home to, among others, "Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, the Mozilla Foundation, Twitter and Yahoo," it notes that the city is "a natural jurisdiction to take the lead in developing and certifying an open voting system."

Before proposing the new hearing this week that will look at how that plan is progressing, Supervisor Weiner told local PBS radio station KQED: "We want to set a trend here and around the country toward more open and transparent voting systems. When you rely on an outside vendor, it's their technology which is proprietary and confidential and the public really doesn't have access to the code that they're relying on."

He added: "It's very 'black box,' so we just have to have faith that their machines are producing accurate results."

The Board of Supervisors has already approved the move to open source in theory, passing a resolution back in December 2014 that the city should "work with other jurisdictions and organizations to create new voting systems using open source software." But yet again it punted the issue to another group to carry out "a study of the feasibility and cost-effectiveness" of such a system.

Now that the move is really underway, the argument has moved on to cost.

Dominion's regional sales manager told KQED that its existing system would be less costly. "Our new voting system has a tremendous amount of efficiency that cuts the cost and increases the transparency of running an election," said Steven Bennett.

And he's right in that the bulk of Dominion's costs were paid for in the first four-year contract, with annual maintenance costs stretching to just over $1m. It was that low-maintenance cost for an existing system that in large part resulted in its contract being renewed in 2011 up until the end of 2016.

Upfront costs

Of the $20m paid to Dominion, $13m of it came at the start of the contract and comprised of replacing the old system with new voting machines. Of that $13m, the city of San Francisco only paid $4m, however: the rest came from federal and state funds.

Compared with the roughly $1m maintenance costs of the existing system, the costs of developing a new, open source system has been estimated at $2.3m, all of which San Francisco will need to pay. The Elections Commission warned, however, that the total cost may be anywhere from $4m to $18m.

Meanwhile, the director of the department of elections has cancelled his planned bidding proposal from new election machines and is in negotiation to extend the existing Dominion contract until such a time as an open source approach becomes viable.

What San Franciscans are hoping is that organizations like the OSET Foundation will be able to come up with a working open source solution in time to beat off the real competition – other cities planning to do the same.

Los Angeles has been working on a similar plan since 2009 and is expected to go live with it in 2020. Nothing would be a bigger blow to San Francisco's honor than being beaten at their own game by its southern sister. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like