Voting Machine Gets LinuxWorld Tryout
Like many people, Alan Dechert was outraged when the 2000 presidential election was thrown to the Supreme Court because nobody could figure out how Florida’s voters had voted.
An engineer who has designed and tested software for a living, he thinks the outcomes of elections should never be in doubt.
So Dechert and a couple of colleagues founded the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit group dedicated to delivering “trustable and open voting systems.” In addition to lobbying against proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years working with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting machine of their own.




