So in this election year I have spent a lot of time thinking about voting and technology.. I see a lot of purpose built and closed systems outthere, and there are a few open systems.. But in my limited research I haven'tseen talk of but no action on a truly open source voting framework.. What I amtalking about is a series of services that would create a secure votingsystem.. Here are the design goals I am considering for this project.

• Distributed & Self healing data model :  The actual votes should be stored in multiple locations with enough parity between each location that N number of locations can be compromised and the results from the vote still be trusted and valid.
• Self recounts: This is something I did in a Voting system for an NPO many moons ago.. No user vote was ever associated with a specific user BUT all user votes were given an ID.. The User (Voter) was given the ID and could look up their vote any time.. In these cases when the voting base doesn't trust the results, they can still validate that their vote WAS recorded correctly.. This would allow grass root organizations to do "pseudo" recounts on their own using information they gather from voters about the accuracy of their vote and some statistical analysis.. if things seem TOO far out of whack then actual recounts can be executed.
• Scoped Voting: This is something that has bugged me for a LONG time.. If I am a voter who lives in a state but I go to the wrong polling place my entire VOTE is provisional or void.. I would suggest that disenfranchising these voters we scope the vote.  After all National concerns like President and Senatorial elections are still valid for you. The rest of the ballet could be marked provisional.. The same could be true if you move from one part of a county to another.. Perhaps you can't vote in the congressional seat but you can on county bonds or state initiatives. By scoping the vote we allow voters a chance for their voice to be heard accurately and give them the dynamics they need.
• Vote Anywhere: The goal here is to allow voters the opportunity to vote their specific ballot (based on their registration) regardless of their physical location or the polling station they actually vote at.. This could also extend to the web. This, specifically, isn't pie in the sky tech; Travis County Texas already did this using Hart Intercivics voting system at all of their early voting centers.
• Hardware (and UI agnostic) : By this I mean that the application should be service based.. Private hardware providers should be allowed to build hardware or software that integrates with the voting service.  This is especially important when dealing with special needs voters. And of course this could allow for online or web based voting.
• Deep but anonymous Logs and Auditing trails: By this we mean that actions should (for privacy) be anonymised from the specific user that executed them BUT there should be deep logging so that should a node in the service become invalid (see Distributed and Self Healing) that it can be analyzed to determine the true cause of the issue.
• Voter Identity validation without ID: Using a series of questions & answers based on the user the identity of that use should be able to be validate to a level of certainty that is equal to or greater than that of forced State ID regulations.. This system could be used as a backup in locations where a person is missing their ID or for Online voting.

At thispoint its all just brain candy that I'm playing with. But I guess I have 4years to figure it out and get some of these ideas into code or architecture.  If your interested in these ideas or want to help let me know if there is enough backing I may start a formal project, otherwise I'll just tinker with it in my proverbial garage.