The current U.S. voting systems run on corporate owned " proprietary" software code, and often lack paper ballots. The California Secretary of State conducted a " Top to Bottom" Review that verified previous conclusions regarding security flaws and shoddy design. The intellectual property protection of the software code used in election systems is a barrier to secure systems and a proper certification process The world has witnessed the outflow of insecure elections. Open Voting Consortium ( OVC ) has demonstrated open source / paper ballot printing systems to be utilized by jurisdictions. OVC has also actively promoted the adoption of international standards for election system data. The U.S. needs open standards as well as open source for election systems.

We urge the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to formally join the Open Voting Consortium as members.