Mike and I have been noting for some time the benefits of having interoperability in voting technologies. OASIS, one of the international standards boards, has approved Election Markup Language as such a standard. As govtech.com noted:

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, this week announced that its members have approved the Election Markup Language (EML) version 5.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS Election and Voter Services Technical Committee, EML supports information exchange through the complete election process, including candidate nomination, voter registration and authentication, ballot information, vote casting and confirmation, tabulation, auditing and more.

“In the election industry today, there are many different election systems and a wide variety of components used for many different functions, so the need for easier integration of different system components has never been greater,” said Dr. Ron Rivest, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “EML is an example of the kind of consensus-based, publicly available common format that enables the exchange of electronic records between different components in election systems.”