SF Open Source Voting TAC

Meeting Minutes: December 14, 2017

Order of Business

1. Call to Order & Roll Call

Chair Jerdonek called the meeting to order at 6:05 p.m. Present: Members Jerdonek, Kattouw, and Wasserman. Member Bafundo was excused absent. Member Hage arrived late at 6:15 p.m during item #4. Also present: Secretary Chan.

2. General Public Comment

Ms. Mirka Morales mentioned election integrity news in various parts of the country. Alabama got a court order to preserve digital ballot images. Florida was going to do a manual recount of a 2016 election, but found those ballots to be destroyed. She mentioned these because the issue of ballot integrity also needs to be addressed for San Francisco.

3. Approval of Minutes of Previous Meeting

Member Wasserman noted that he was named as the member to report at the Elections Commission’s January and February meetings, but it should say that he is available for the meetings and not necessarily selected to go.

Member Kattouw said that he was responding to questions raised by Chair Jerdonek regarding his use of the word “reproducible.” Chair Jerdonek said there shouldn’t be an ellipsis there.

The term “LibrePlanet” has no space between the word parts.

The conference held in Southern California is called SCALE (followed by an ordinal).

Member Wasserman moved to approve with the discussed edits. Member Kattouw seconded. Upon voice vote, the motion carried unanimously, 4-0.

4. Member Reports

Chair Jerdonek will be speaking at a conference at UC Hastings College of Law in January and a conference in May, which is the same as last year’s Global Election Technology Summit. He mentioned the template document from Slalom and said that the content given should be viewed more as a placeholder rather than true content.

There was a short discussion around some of the open source software that Member Hage investigated (e.g OpenCount) and some of the problems he encountered trying to run them. OpenCount is written as a monolith. Prime III has leveraged other open source packages, but it “looks like a student product.” An interface was mentioned that called a “low error-ability interface.” It is supposed to reduce the amount of user error.

Members discussed how Prime III did and did not work (e.g. ballot images, QR codes, and use in municipal elections). Member Hage said the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) had done a demo with Santa Cruz using it.

Member Wasserman mentioned a Mozilla speech recognition project. He mentioned Helios, an online open source election system for smaller organizations.

Member Hage said he reached out to one of the creators of OpenCount to see if he can get the documentation for that program. Asked if these should be used, Member Hage said maybe as models but not directly. He also mentioned briefly a commercial vendor (Clear Ballot) that is closed source but offers a COTS hardware approach. It is not certified by California yet.

There was a short discussion around which browsers should be used for open source voting, and what forms of ballots or alternative format ballots can be utilized. (Member Kattouw described a process followed in a recent European Parliament election.)

Member Hage can further develop this section and propose recommendations.

Chair Jerdonek reported that Colorado still hasn’t open sourced its risk-limiting audit software, possibly because of unforeseen issues. He mentioned that in his investigation of GPLv3, there are step-by-step instruction to follow, and it is recommended that the license be issued from the very beginning of program development.

He referred to the Slalom report (in the packet) in regards to the open source governance model. This was discussed briefly, including not using the term “dictator” because it could be misconstrued.

Public comment: None.

5. Administration

Member Wasserman cannot attend TAC’s next meeting if it is held the second Thursday in January. Chair Jerdonek felt it preferable to have all present, so the third Thursday would be looked at first.

Regarding licensing, Member Kattouw wasn’t able to reach his lawyer colleague to get details. However, he said that Chair Jerdonek had included some things in the document related to this topic. Chair Jerdonek put license text in the document for GPLv3 and CC-BY-SA 4.0. The committee probably doesn’t need a formal contributor license agreement (CLA).

The committee reviewed the Report #2 draft prepared by Member Bafundo. Comments and suggested edits included:

• Minor typos in the document.
• List all four committee meetings.
• No need to attach minutes. Just provide a link.
• The link in the second paragraph should be on the “About” page.
• Remove mention of Member Wasserman speaking in Bangalore.
• Member Kattouw attended a conference in Berkeley (Take Back the Vote) that Chair Jerdonek spoke at.
• Member Hage is participating in a NIST working group related to elections data and interoperability, but not representing the Committee.
• Mention that the Committee adopted a policy to encourage members to educate others on open source voting.

In the Recommendations section, Member Wasserman offered, “the TAC continues to work on a recommendation document that aims at providing guidance to the City for developing an open source voting system.”

Chair Jerdonek: in the second sentence, “this document is being developed iteratively and in public view on GitHub in the same way that open source projects are developed.”

Add another paragraph mentioning that the Committee established a policy to license their document and code. Also add a sentence providing a link to where the latest version can be found.

Remove the quotes around “recommendation document” in subsequent mentions. Choose a title for the document. Verify the spelling of Jessie’s name. There is a typo in the second paragraph, third line: “specifying everything in a request…” In page two, change, “It has learned that Colorado…” to “Colorado…”

In the last sentence starting, “Texas has abandoned open source voting,” change the last part to, “due to the lack of a complete combination of RFP responses.” In the part about building awareness, name the two upcoming conferences. The report should also have only one attachment, the recommendations as of tonight.

Public comment: Ms. Mirka Morales asked if anyone knew when Los Angeles was going to start using their new system. Also, is their “tally” system going to be used for all voters or just a portion?

Chair Jerdonek said that at a previous meeting he said that the LA County Registrar said that the stack would be open source but that the code would merely be publicly owned.

There were no other edits to be added. Chair Jerdonek said he will add in the date that he sends the revised document. Member Kattouw moved to approve the document with the edits. Member Wasserman seconded . By voice vote the motion carried unanimously, 4-0.

6. Committee Goals and Assumptions

(This and the following agenda items #6 through #10 relate to the Committee’s recommendations document on their GitHub site and the agenda packet documents that relate to each section.)

No discussion took place for this item.

Public comment: None.

7. Project Background and Terminology

Chair Jerdonek had two patches submitted, one related to the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) being updated and one adding a few terms. There was a short discussion about the term “outstack” (ballots not recognized by the machine and separated out for manual review).

There was a question about how the VVSG could be required if they are called “voluntary.” Chair Jerdonek said it might have to do with whether the State or Federal certification process is being used.

Member Hage will put together a subset of what he wrote for tonight, for this section. He’ll also do a description of what Prime III is and how it works. Chair Jerdonek moved to adopt the changes in the two documents. Seconded by Member Hage. By voice vote, the motion carried unanimously, 4-0.

Public comment: None.

8. Project Management and Procurement

The Committee has not received the materials from Jessie Posilkin yet. Chair Jerdonek will follow up with Member Bafundo about this. For now, he wanted TAC to adopt a statement acknowledging that parts of San Francisco City government are interested in using agile, and that it would make sense for the Department to work with them in implementing agile for this project. Another statement is that if we are going to have an interim stage where we scan ballots using third-party software, we need a way to get a layout of the ballot in a structured format. This could be a human-assisted process.

The Committee discussed ballot format software, ballot layout creation software, and what would be produced by it. Member Hage asked if the City uses GEMS software. No, it is Dominion’s system. There were comments about making auditing an early, and parallel portion of the initial phase of development, rather than later. Member Wasserman also commented that there shouldn’t be a hyphen between the words open source.

Public comment: Ms. Mirka Morales raised the question of whether San Francisco would use two different ballots – some with QR codes and some without.

If the City uses pre-printed ballots, they would not be able to use QR codes. However, if the ballots are on-demand, they could. This is a topic the Committee can weigh in on.

Member Hage thought the Committee could make a list of all the major decision points, options and issues, to be added in the Recommendations section.

Member Wasserman asked if we wanted to have a goal that the system could be operated manually, for example in case of power failure.

Member Kattouw moved to approve the two patches with edits, seconded by Member Hage. Upon voice vote the motion carried unanimously 4-0.

9. Committee Recommendations

Chair Jerdonek reviewed Member Bafundo’s suggestion at the last meeting to take sections of the document and work on it at the meeting, so he selected this section for review, as well as submitting two patches for it.

Suggestions: countermeasure has no hyphen. Chair Jerdonek said if the Committee hasn’t already made the statement, it should say that all of the system should be open source.

Member Hage suggested that the computer equipment use a secure boot and that the secure boot recognize a digital signature (e.g. from the California Secretary of State).

The Committee discussed the issue of having trusted hardware versus software and how jurisdictions could verify that the software is the same (e.g. as binaries). One issue is securing the hardware (e.g. storing the machines so they are not tampered with). Member Wasserman mentioned the cloud and posited that there are implications to the development process. For example, how would one specify the build environment in that case?

Chair Jerdonek referred to the second patch regarding having test data separate from the underlying code. Two points were expressed: having digital ballot pictures from elections, and keeping the test data separate from the actual code (e.g. which would more easily permit multiple implementations of the same software component). The Committee discussed various elements of the testing process and quality assurance in general.

San Francisco’s current system does not have a built-in capability to produce digital ballot pictures, so an extra scanner would need to be used. Also, since election ballots are sealed, the scanning could not be done later.

Member Kattouw moved to adopt the patches with edits, seconded by Member Hage. Upon voice vote the motion carried unanimously, 4-0.

Reviewing the Recommendations section of the document: Chair Jerdonek said the section is currently divided into eighteen topic areas, with eight yet to be filled in at all.

Member Hage suggested separating what he is preparing (decision points, pros and cons, etc) from this large section, and having a more detailed description of the incremental approach, modules, and the like in a separate section.

Member Wasserman referred to sections 4.3 and 4.4 and suggested identifying the different “actors” in the system – e.g. all types of voters and the kinds of things the system has to provide for them, as well as those who are providing the service. This way the Committee could better cover all the requirements the system needs to fulfill.

Possibly create a new section in the document that speaks to what needs to be built: what title would that section have, or would it be part of background?

Member Wasserman discussed the value of identifying the user stories and the personas who would be active in the context of the election system. If doing agile he would recommend “sprints”: user stories and what will be implemented in each sprint, starting with who’s involved and ending up describing the work to be done in each step of the process.

Points brought up: sub-divide the background section and put this in there. The incremental section is also getting unwieldy. Possibly title it: “Initial Phase, First Components.” Take section 4.2 and make it section 5.0. Add audits as a category.

Regarding the central ballot scanner, mention having ballot batch management. Separate the component descriptions out. Explain the functionality of each, including a high-level description of what it does, the inputs, the outputs, and the sub-components.

Chair Jerdonek suggested highlighting sections regarding the first phase vis-a-vis the budget and timeline. Move the components section out and list all of them regardless of the order in which they are needed. Should there be a section for proposed components and proposed phases? Chair Jerdonek will work on this for the next meeting.

The document needs an executive summary. The committee would need to discuss what needs to be included. Members could bring patches to the meeting for discussion and action and include them in the agenda packet. Member Wasserman will work on user stories and context. Chair Jerdonek will break out the phase descriptions. Member Kattouw will work on the “to-do” about elections and find a place in the recommendations section for something regarding reproducible builds and secure boots.

Member Hage, regarding section 4.6, suggested separating out sensitive code from unsensitive code. One goal should be to minimize the amount of code.

Member Hage also raised the subject of revision control, saying that all “intermediate files” should be in a format compatible with revision inspection. Member Kattouw will review this with his other tasks.

Public comment: None.

10. Voting Process and Equipment Decisions

Member Hage suggested a new section for the Committee’s document: one listing decisions that have to be made, along with pros and cons and background information. There is already some language on requirements gathering and key decisions, but that could be combined with what Member Hage is working on.

Member Wasserman mentioned that the term “voting types” does relate to personas. Member Hage agreed there should be a section like this.

The question was raised as to where to draw the line between questions the Committee should answer and those the Department should.

Chair Jerdonek suggested that Member Hage take section 4.3.1 and merge it with his draft, in a consistent format.

Member Kattouw mentioned the question of the type of printing devices (requiring power, potential for jamming, etc) as one that needs answering or recommending.

Public comment: Ms. Mirka Morales asked about AB 450: does the county have the option to go directly to vote-by-mail, or does it have to use the vote center process? She said that Los Angeles is moving toward vote centers, and providing mail ballots only to those who are registered as permanent vote-by-mail.

11. Topics for future discussion

No topics were suggested.

Public comment: None.

Adjourned at 9:25 p.m.