SF Open Source Voting TAC

Meeting Minutes: April 11, 2019 (approved May 14, 2019)

Order of Business

1. Call to Order & Roll Call

Chair Jerdonek called the meeting to order at 6:10 p.m. Present: Members Hage, Jerdonek, Kattouw. Excused absence: Member Wasserman. Unexcused absense: Member Philips. Also present: Secretary Walker.

2. General Public Comment

None.

3. Open Source Voting Project Plan (6:11 p.m.)

Chair Jerdonek:

• reported that representatives from the Department of Technology, although invited, were not present. City CIO Gerull sent Chair Jerdonek an email with an update.

• stated that CIO Gerull met with members of the California Clean Money Campaign to discuss the Department of Technology supporting a proposal from the California Clean Money Campaign to receive up to $8 million in matching funds from the California State Legislature to develop an Open Source Voting System. CIO Gerull gave recommendations to the California Clean Money Campaign, prepared budget request materials to present to the Committee on Information Technology Finance Committee, began drafting voting system requirements documents, and is preparing to begin discussing the full Open Source Voting System Project Plan with the larger community.

• announced that the Open Source Voting Project Community Organizing meeting, to be convened by the Department of Technology on April 26 at 3pm, at 1 South Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco.

• suggested that OSVTAC members share the announcement with their personal networks once the meeting announcement was made available by the Department of Technology;

• suggested that Elections Commission meeting attendees, those who attended the last Open Source Voting conference style event in 2015, software companies and vendors were all examples of potential invitees to the April 26 meeting.

• Members generated the following list of organizations to invite:

  • Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)
  • CivicActions
  • Code for America
  • Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF)
  • FairVote California
  • Global Election Technology Summit (GET Summit)
  • Open Source Election Technology (OSET Foundation)
  • San Francisco League of Women Voters
  • Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors Voting Advisory Committee
  • Software Freedom Conservancy
  • Stanford University CodeX
  • VotingWorks

Public comment: None.

4. Approval of Minutes of Previous Meetings (6:24 p.m.)

Public comment: None.

Member Kattouw moved (Member Hage seconded) to approve the minutes of the February 14, 2019 OSVTAC meeting. Secretary Walker took a roll call vote. - AYES: 3; NOES 0; ABSENT: 2. Motion carries unanimously.

Chair Jerdonek tabled consideration of the March 14, 2019 OSVTAC Minutes.

5. Administration (6:26 p.m.)

Chair Jerdonek agreed to report on behalf of the OSVTAC at the next Regular Elections Commission meeting on Wednesday, April 17.

Member Kattouw volunteered to prepare OSVTAC’s next tri-annual report to the Elections Commission.

Chair Jerdonek reported that several OSVTAC members’ terms expire after the May 2019 meeting and so will need to be reappointed.

Public comment: None.

6. Member Reports (6:33 p.m.)

Member Hage provided a report of activities since the previous meeting.

Member Kattouw reported that the matching funds proposal from the Assemblymember Santiago has been published and assigned number AB 1784. He briefly described the requirements as outlined in the bill that would need to be achieved before receiving either a 3-to-1 match if voting system is developed prior to the year 2022; a 2-to-1 funds match if the system is up and running by year 2024, or a regular 1-to-1 match should the system be implemented by the year 2026.

Member Hage discussed issues related to the chain of custody that is developed during the tabulation of voting results.

Public comment: None.

7. Digital Signatures (6:43 p.m.)

Members discussed a number of issues related to voting system component development, including digital signatures, SHASUM hash files, using Perl and Python (programming languages), and signature verification software solutions.

Also discussed were digital certificates, the different state and federal mechanisms to certify open source voting system components, methods to systemize voting system languages, and ways to encrypt the voting system. Whether or not to develop a glossary for the requirements documents was also considered

Public comment: None.

8. Voting System Component Development (7:15 p.m.)

A number of suggestions were made to add to the running list of features to be included in the Open Source Voting System, including:

• Sort candidate lists generated by the voting system by last name

• Adding a table of contents at the top of quick links menu

• Having a table of contents page linked to all contests listed on the summary page.

• Write a template loop that builds categories of subtotals, sorted to categorical order.

• Distinguish the classification of a precinct from the classification of all district types.

• Design larger headers

• Add wrapper script for running ORR through Docker

• Sort the ranked choice voting report rows by reverse order of elimination

• Determine how to demonstrate San Francisco ranked choice voting methodology, such as how ranked choice votes should be displayed, how runoff votes are reported, and how to display elections with nontraditional super majority vote margins.

• Determine whether proposed winner status codes should be spelled out fully or signified with single digit or letter curves.

Public comment: None.

9. Public Contributions to OSVTAC Projects

The committee members brainstormed processes that could be used to review and accept pull requests from members of the public within the constraints of the Sunshine Ordinance.

Public comment: None.

10. Topics for future discussion

Chair Jerdonek mentioned that the topic of data licensing had come up in the past as a possible topic.

Public comment: None.

Adjourned at 8:30 p.m.