It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

(Tom Stoppard, British playwright, 1972)

If the counting of the vote lies at the heart of democracy then vote-counting conducted in secret on proprietary software is a dagger threatening to still that heartbeat and undermine the integrity of the process.   Among those who have looked into the abyss of secret vote-counting software is California Secretary of State Debra Bowen when she set up a task force to study the software used in her state’s elections. Read the rest of this entry »