Open Source Voting System Project Recommendations

(Approved by OSVTAC on March 14, 2019.)

Last posted: June 9, 2019

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4. Facts & Assumptions

This section lists certain facts and assumptions the committee has made while drafting this document.

4.1. Facts

1. The Director of Elections’ March 2017 Director’s Report began outlining characteristics of the development plan for the open source voting system. These included—

   • For the system to be “Developed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License where possible, otherwise preferring similar licenses with copyleft characteristics.” This is consistent with the recommendation in the Commission’s Open Source Voting Systems Resolution (PDF) in its third “resolved” paragraph:

     (d) Express a preference for open source licenses with copyleft characteristics so that San Francisco and other jurisdictions can benefit from future improvements that others make to the voting system components;

   • To post the software developed for the new system “as it is written.” This is also consistent with the recommendations in the same “resolved” paragraph of the Commission’s resolution:

     (b) Incorporate openness and transparency into the project, for example … by releasing all development products, including software source code and documentation, as they are developed;

4.2. Assumptions

1. The Department of Elections does not currently have the expertise to conduct the day-to-day management of the development and certification of an open source voting system.

2. The voting system should not require counting the votes on ballots by hand (not including hand-counting for audit or recount purposes).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For copyright and attribution information for this work, see this section. The source files for the text can be found on GitHub here.