San Francisco pushes ahead towards open-source voting program - The San Francisco Examiner
Shamann Walton, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, announced The City’s plans to experiment with a pilot voting machine system based on open-source technology. (Jessica Christian/The Examiner)
San Francisco is finally making some progress using open-source technology in voting machines, a long-stalled city project that advocates say could save taxpayer money, add security and give voters more transparency in elections.
On Tuesday night, President Shamann Walton told the Board of Supervisors he is moving forward on plans for a pilot program to use open-source voting machines as soon as The City’s November 2022 elections.
“Open-source voting technology would allow The City’s tech teams to work with vendors on voting equipment software because it uses publicly available computer code,” Walton said, quoting a recent Examiner investigation into San Francisco’s voting machine systems.
Correspondence obtained by The Examiner through a public records request showed that San Francisco’s Elections Department failed to make progress on developing open-source voting technology for more than a decade, while relying heavily on a voting machine company that sees such technology as a threat to its business interests.
