A group of concerned citizens called the Advocacy for Open Systems in Elections is offering a free, open source solution for automating the counting of election results. Ito Gruet, a member of the group, was interviewed by Erwin Oliva of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the video of the interview is available on the Inquirer website as “Pushing open source solutions for elections“.
Gruet revealed that the group advocating the use of open standards and open source software for the automated election system, which would help ensure the transparency of the electoral process. Gruet explained:
Basically it’s to ensure that we are able to track and trace back to a source document and audit the results of the elections. And what we are proposing is the we make this process tranasparent to the public… to all the voters. Transparent in terms of the technology to be used, so we should be using open standards. We believe that the software should be open source so that people in the know can look at it, can review, and see if it’s really a working system. Transparent in terms of the data itself, which means that results should be easily verifiable by the public, and anybody can do their own tabulation.
Posted by Maddog 
