Lectio Reformo™ is the OSDV Foundation's evolving Manifesto. It is currently in its first draft, and is available for download as a PDF, here. We welcome your comments and feedback.

This document is best viewed with Adobe® Acrobat®

Here's an excerpt:

The deplorable state of U.S. voting technology and adoption thereof has motivated the OSDV manifesto, “Lectio Reformo” – a phrase we’ve very loosely coined from Latin to suggest “reforming elections.”

We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. The OSDV manifesto is what we’ve learned and now believe. And it’s time to act. The U.S. technology sector has a history of tackling difficult problems head-on. It’s our hope that this manifesto and the efforts of OSDV will rally the collective creativity, ingenuity, and effort of all corners of the U.S. tech sector – from the Silicon Valley to the Research Triangle, to the 128 Loop, to the Silicon Forest, and everywhere in between.

Here’s our bottom line: The greatest threat to the vitality of our democracy is lack of trust in the process of voting and election results. For elections to retain real meaning, confidence must be restored in this country’s systems of conducting voting in a reliable transparent manner. Those systems must accurately capture the will of each voter. A 21st century democracy should find significant value in technology to assist the process of voting. Technology should be a trustworthy asset to democracy; however, so far the opposite is true.

We, the people, must reclaim the integrity of our elections processes. To help that, the OSDV seeks to define the future of elections technology and develop draft standards for the same. And we hope you’ll join us in this essential mission. Get started by having a look at the full Manifesto, here.