Future of Voting Systems Symposium Summary

from: Jessica Myers on Mar 14, 2013

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sponsored a two and a half day symposium at NIST (Gaithersburg, MD) to explore emerging trends in voting system technology with the election community at large.

The sponsoring organizations had lively discussion focusing:

· Why some jurisdictions are exploring building their own voting systems

· Trends in voting system technology acquisition and deployment plans

· How election officials, manufactures, young voters, and academics view the future of voting system technologies

· Alternative standard development processes for voting systems

· Alternative methods for voting system testing and certification at the Federal and State level

The symposium provided an environment for interactive discussions among the attendees including election officials, voting system manufacturers, voting system test laboratories, standard developers, academics, and Federal, State, and local government officials. EAC is reviewing the information gleaned and major themes that came up during the course of the symposium. EAC is in the early stages of discussing possible roundtables and working groups to carry out further research and work on common themes and areas of focus for future work.

Some of the common themes discussed were: modular or component testing, the future of Federal certification, use of web based technologies, how to incorporate periphery tools/components (epollbooks, voter registration databases, etc.) in to voting systems and voting system testing, the use of audits in elections and much more. The EAC will post a more focused write up and summary of the topics we will focus on this year in a blog in the next few weeks, after we have had an opportunity to review all of the information and set internal goals.

Information on future roundtables, meetings, workshops, etc. will be announced via the EAC website, blogs and Twitter (#FOV13).Presentations from and the webcast of the symposium are available online.

If you have additional questions, please contact Jessica Myers at jmyers@eac.gov or via Twitter (@EACgov).

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