Earlier this year, before starting this Advogato journal, I traveled from Chicago out to Washington DC to attend several events related to voting. I've been meaning to document them somewhere. This seems to be as good a place as any.

In January 2000, I was able to attend a one day symposium on The Future of Internet Voting, sponsored by The Brookings Institution and Cisco Systems. The event included a number of big name people.

In February 2000, I was able to attend the founding assembly of the Internet Voting Technology Alliance. Although the IVTA seemed to have a solid beginning, it hasn't really accomplished much as of this writing.

In March/April 2000, I was able to attend a conference put on by the Voting Integrity Project. It was quite a good conference - mixing, in one place, people from a number of different disciplines related to voting.

In August 2000, I drove out to DC to attend a meeting sponsored by the US Federal Election Commission. The meeting was to review a partial draft of updated US Voting System Standards published by the FEC, and used by most of the US states to certify voting systems for public elections. It was a beneficial meeting.

In the next few weeks I plan to publish my feedback to the FEC on this partial draft of the updated VSS. I am fairly certain that I am the only person from the open-source/free-software realm to be working with the FEC on this. All the other people either work for a for-profit voting system vendor, are a government official, or are involved with performing certification tests on the voting systems.

My primary concern is insuring that none of the FEC requirements prevent an open-source or free-software voting system from being certified. My secondary concern is trying to insure they don't make the requirements unnecessarily narrow - and thus prevent voting systems with non-traditional designs from being built.