OASIS Open

Election and Voter Services Technical Committee

To develop a standard for the structured interchange of data among hardware, software, and service providers who engage in any aspect of providing election or voter services, be they partly paper-based or fully e-enabled, to public or private organizations. The services performed for such elections and referenda include but are not limited to:

• candidate nomination,
• referendum options nomination,
• voter registration,
• polling places, districting and boundaries
• various communications between voters and elections officials,
• ballot information
• voter authentication
• vote casting and vote confirmation
• election counts, statistics and results.

The Technical Committee will focus on identifying the global requirements for data exchanges during the end to end processes of elections and referenda and producing XML schemas to facilitate those exchanges.

Within this general scope the activities of this Technical Committee may include, but are not limited to:

• Dialog and collaboration with election officials, stakeholders and agencies and other standards activities in the identification and articulation of requirements, of operational practices and constraints;
• Technical development, refinement and formalization of standards documents to specify data elements, document and message schemas, web service definitions, profiles and any other specifications that may facilitate useful data exchange among data systems for elections and referenda;
• Participation in and evaluation of interoperability trials and demonstrations, independently or in concert with other organizations or agencies;
• Development and publication of supplemental materials that may further the adoption or implementation of standards created by or recommended by the Technical Committee; and,
• Collaboration with other OASIS Technical Committees and other standards groups in the development and deployment of standards it deems valuable to election officials.

The Technical Committee will NOT be offering compliance certification, product testing or product rating services. However, the Technical Committee may collaborate with other organizations that offer such services on an equitable and nondiscriminatory basis.

• Autumn 2009: EML v6.0 approved as OASIS Standard
• End 2009: submission to ISO/JTC1 for adoption as ISO standard
• Ongoing: maintenance, enhancement and outreach support

This TC operates under the RF on Limited Terms Mode of the OASIS IPR Policy

Anyone involved in the running and/or administration of elections and referenda both in the public and private sectors and vendors providing software and services to assist in those tasks.

English