Los Angeles County is home to a burgeoning technology industry. It boasts a roster of high-profile companies including Hulu, Snapchat, and Tinder. As of 2013, it offered more high-tech jobs than other major markets in the country, including Silicon Valley and New York City. Come election time, however, its residents cast their votes by marking inkblots on ballots that resemble Scantron forms.

This discrepancy hasn’t gone unnoticed. In fact, thanks to recent efforts, it’s gradually narrowing. LA County is finally in the process of developing an open source voting system, purported to be a flexible, intuitive replacement of the incumbent method.

Under the new system, slated for public use in 2020, voters will indicate their choices on a touchscreen-operated tablet, after which a machine at the voting booth will print and process their paper ballots to be tallied. This is a leap from the ink-based system, which has remained unchanged since its adoption in 2003.

The project, which began in 2009, stems from a combination of misfortune and luck. After the 2000 presidential election, many jurisdictions adopted paperless voting systems in compliance with new federal legislation. LA County couldn’t make the shift; the electronic systems on the market lacked the capacity to process its high volume of votes, and the county was forced to develop its own software. Eventually, some of the other jurisdictions’ machines began to fail and lost their certification. Though spared, Los Angeles County recognized this volatility, and it started drafting plans for a more sustainable solution.

“We observed what took place in the last decade with this heightened awareness and sensitivity to voting technology at the same time as this kind of evolution of open-source,” said Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan. “It just seemed like a natural fit to look at this.”

As an alternative to electronic systems, an open source framework will likely offer a more adaptable and affordable model for procuring voting equipment. Traditionally, counties sign end-to-end agreements with private vendors, wherein one company provides the software, hardware, and support for a voting system, offering little flexibility in pricing, use, and design. By managing its own software, LA becomes independent from the single-vendor schema, and it has relative control over the types of hardware it invests in and the amount of money it spends.

“We wanted to do this on an agile basis and a component based-system,” Logan said. “So if there’s somebody who can provide us the video monitors at the best price, then we’ll buy the video monitors from them, and we’ll integrate that with other components.”

At first glance, an open source model for material as sensitive as voting results might cause security concerns. Though this isn’t an issue yet—so far, all code written has been used strictly for testing and functional prototypes—Logan said the county will establish a protocol aligned with state regulations when it starts work on the system’s production code. For now, the code for the user interface prototype (designed by private firm IDEO) is patterned after the Anywhere Ballot, a UI design model for open source voting systems.

Julianne Tveten

Julianne Tveten

Currently in the design phase, the project is being tested on citizens for refinement of the user experience and interface. Logan and his colleagues have conducted a series of simulated-voting sessions wherein users of varying demographics—senior citizens, people with disabilities, veterans, Spanish and Korean speakers—provide feedback on nuances ranging from the semantic and visual clarity of text on the screen to the feeling of privacy.

“Some of it is really simple things, like, 'Where should that button be that says ‘Scroll up’ or ‘Scroll down?’” Logan said. “While that might seem insignificant to some people, I would argue that that’s the level of detail that’s never been contemplated in the design of voting systems before now.”

The county is also considering a number of customizable options to bolster voter turnout, which has suffered in recent years. Along with the new system, it plans to introduce a “poll pass,” which allows users to pre-mark their votes using their phone, tablet, or desktop and scan them with a QR code at their polling place. Logan said the new system is designed to let users vote anywhere in the county, rather than at a designated polling station. He hopes to broaden the 7:00am to 8:00pm voting window to a multi-day “voting period,” during which a limited number of stations would be open prior to the election. There’s even talk of an electronic equivalent to absentee voting—if and when the law permits.

Noting the potential advantages, other jurisdictions have expressed interest in agile voting models. LA is working in concert with Travis County, Texas, which is also actively carrying out an open source transition plan. Additional areas are considering the shift; LA County is publishing its design prototypes and data from research, surveys, and user interviews in efforts to encourage and facilitate wider adoption.

“I think the model we’re putting into place will lead the next generation of voting technology in the country and hopefully will broaden the market of those companies that are in that process,” Logan said. “Time will tell, but that’s my hope.”