SF Open Source Voting TAC

Meeting Minutes: May 9, 2018 (approved July 10, 2018)

Order of Business

1. Call to Order & Roll Call

Chair Jerdonek called the meeting to order at 6:01 p.m. Present: Members Hage, Jerdonek, Kattouw. Excused absences: Members Bafundo and Wasserman. Also present: Secretary Chan.

2. General Public Comment

No members of the public were present.

3. Approval of Minutes of Previous Meetings

Member Kattouw pointed out a typographical error in the April minutes. With that correction, the minutes were approved by a vote of 3-0.

4. Administration

Chair Jerdonek will see if either Member Bafundo or Member Wasserman can do the TAC report at the next Commission meeting. If no member can attend, then Chair Jerdonek will do the report. The next Committee meeting will have to be in another room. Secretary Chan will confirm which room that will be. Chair Jerdonek thanked Member Kattouw for doing TAC’s written report to the Commission. It is posted on the website and has gone to the Commission. The updates on the website will be done soon.

There were no public comments.

5. Member Reports

Chair Jerdonek reported on an event organized by the California Clean Money Campaign on Sunday. It kicked off their campaign to support open source voting. It was attended by about 125 people with many political officials speaking in support. Member Kattouw also attended the meeting. Chair Jerdonek also mentioned a budget committee meeting of the Board of Supervisors tomorrow morning, with an agenda item on open source voting. He will be presenting during it.

Member Kattouw heard at Sunday’s event mention of open source voting in Ohio using Prime III. He found a citation from the Open Source Initiative which said Prime III was certified for state usage in Ohio.

Member Kattouw mentioned a tech conference in St. Louis in December. Chair Jerdonek moved to permit Member Kattouw to speak there on behalf of the Committee. Member Hage seconded. There was no public comment. The motion carried 3-0.

Member Hage has been working on getting sample data for the upcoming election from the Department. He found sample ballots online. However, they have watermarks that obstruct what is on the ballot.

Several questions need answers, including how precincts are identified and whether there is a database that translates multilingual ballots. He feels it would be good to have a data package for people who might want to experiment with open source components. Chair Jerdonek said that much of this would fit under item #6 for discussion.

Member Hage reported that he found a sample remote accessible vote by mail ballot online on the San Francisco Department of Elections website (via “Democracy Live”), but that it includes some Google-tracking JavaScript. There was a discussion about how they were doing this and whether State law permitted this for remote vote-by-mail ballots conducted by a third-party.

The committee reviewed the URL that Member Hage found to see what functionality was present.

Member Kattouw said he will be a poll worker and wants to write some software to interpret the RCV data.

Chair Jerdonek reported that COIT had a committee meeting where they recommended allocating only $300K for the open source voting project for the next year, and that this was approved by the full COIT body.

Public comment:

Mr. Sergey Armishev said it would be beneficial if there were links to some site that listed the ballot requirements or formats that need to be met by the open source system (e.g. paper size).

6. Voting System Component Development

Chair Jerdonek reviewed that at the last meeting he brought up the idea of TAC developing one of the easier voting system components, namely the reporting component, as a proof of concept. Member Hage started work on it since the last meeting. Member Hage said that instead of doing a design document he went ahead and put together a rudimentary prototype. His approach was to make a template-based report generator, using HTML5 as a rendering engine. The Committee inspected the samples Member Hage created. He plans to share the repository by the next meeting.

Chair Jerdonek said that he asked Director Arntz how the Department did its summary page and was given their source code. It was a collection of PHP pages – one for each language. It was probably done with in-house staff.

There was a discussion around how Member Hage’s prototype works and what it should be able to do. The two parts to it are code and data manipulation, and building templates and CSS. Member Kattouw offered to work on the latter part. Chair Jerdonek offered to help on the former, and on the Python, testing, and getting Docker working.

Member Hage said that he’d like scanned copies of marked ballots from the election as test data. Member Hage moved to ask the Commission to request the Department to create a set of scanned ballots after the upcoming June election, preferably from one precinct, but if not feasible, then scans of a representative set of at least 100 ballots. Member Kattouw seconded.

Public comment:

Mr. Adam Wojcieh asked if sample ballots were available to view. Member Hage said he could give him a link to a site where he can view one.

The motion carried 3-0.

Chair Jerdonek asked Member Hage if there were any other items for the sample data he wanted to mention. Member Hage replied– getting a scanned blank ballot; getting un-occluded PDF files; learning how they deal with precincts (e.g. doing ballots in batches or using some identifying mark on the ballot); what cast vote record files are created and whether we can get copies of them; are raw count files created or just totals; and whether there is ballot text support for alternative language translations.

7. Project Background and Terminology

Member Hage raised the subject of how using the term “agile” can be insufficiently clear due to its longtime use and interpretation by individuals. It means different things to different people. He suggested that when the term is used, it should be stated specifically what is meant. Member Kattouw reviewed the recommendations document and said it appeared fairly well-defined and clear wherever it was currently being used.

Chair Jerdonek said he’ll try to come up with a short, clear definition for review.

Public comment:

Mr. Adam Wojcieh commented that the committee could simply provide links to existing definitions, and that it wasn’t necessary to come up with their own definition. Also, it means different things depending on the subject (e.g. software or hardware).

8. Equipment Decisions and Implementation Plan

Member Hage referred to the document he revised based on the committee’s previous discussion of it. He pulled out two issues, including whether voting machines should store cast vote records (CVR’s). Member Bafundo informed him that Los Angeles County’s new VSAP system doesn’t store them. There was a short discussion about whether to store or not, and what the pros and cons were. Chair Jerdonek suggested using the term “mark” rather than “print” in the title for section 8.4. On another point, use the term “device” rather than “machine.” It was decided to leave it for now.

The Committee continued looking at Member Hage’s document, discussed the usage of terms and their meanings, and suggested changes to the language. At the conclusion of the discussion, Member Kattouw moved to accept the edits, seconded by Chair Jerdonek. There was no public comment. The motion carried 3-0. The revisions will appear in the Recommendations document on the Committee’s website.

9. Committee Recommendations

There was no discussion on this item.

10. Slalom Report

Committee members shared their initial reflections on the Slalom report, with the intention of more comprehensive discussions taking place during subsequent meetings. Some of the comments included the following.

Member Hage:

In Section 1.1, there is no mention of a detailed design or recommendations for such a design, so their costs estimates are unrealistic. They didn’t consider the requirements and recommendations of how the system should work.

Section 1.5 contradicts the agile approach to design and development.

On page 6, it is only suggested to bring in the open source community after the project is developed, not simultaneous to the development process. It might be better to choose a term different from “benevolent dictator” because of the connotations.

In Section 2.1.2, the report references STAR-Vote as a comparison, but it shouldn’t be a comparison.

Regarding Section 2.1.4, the committee discussed how to involve the open source community in development.

Member Kattouw had comments on two items:

In Section 2.1.5 regarding certification, the report doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of certifying individual components rather than the whole system.

In Section 2.1.6, the issue of licensing is settled, which isn’t implied by the report.

In Section 4, the table doesn’t show any consideration of assets that are open source – only proprietary resources.

11. Topics for future discussion

Two items were raised: the budget for the open source project, and the demonstration results reporter.

Adjourned at 8:35 p.m.