OSS Election Systems Desired, but Not Ready 182
An anonymous reader writes "Even though many American voters are ready for open source systems at the polls, Newsforge (a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting story about why open source may not be ready for the polls. From the article: 'The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin [an e-voting expert] noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). "I don't agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source," Rubin said. OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"
Paper Ballots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
That's all fine and good, except you totally failed to actually address the question. What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries, and they seem to historically have fewer problems than other alternatives.
That in mind, to address your two main concerns:
1. You point out that they can't be mandated at
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2, Interesting)
but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...
I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
you disenfranchise people! (Score:2)
Paper does not self-validate. What if somebody messes up? They get disenfranchised! We "need" to ensure that every moron can just play with the ballot until it is valid.
More seriously, paper is hard to reprint when a candidate dies a week before the election.
Some people with poor eyes need HUGE letters.
Plus, e-voting is all high-tech, so it must be good.
Re:you disenfranchise people! (Score:2)
You then put your ballots (we vote for 3 different levels of government at the same time) in an envelope and drop it into the voting box.
The
Re:you disenfranchise people! (Score:2)
In America, we don't vote for a Party, we vote for a candidate. And usually for more than one. Last federal election, I got to vote for President, Senator, Representative, Governor, Lt. Governor (our Lt. Governor isn't the running mate for the Governor), State Senator, State Representative, Council President, two At-Large Council members, one Council member for my district, two Judges, and four or five State Constitutional Amendments.
And ther
The disabled, the confused, and the stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
A computer UI can, in principle, be made easier to follow than a crowded piece of paper. Googling for "butterfly ballot" will get you an example that turned out to be important. A computerized ballot can do validity checking and spare the counting system from having to divine "voter intent" from a double-voted or unreadable ballot.
Those are the only real advantages I've ever seen mentioned.
Re:The disabled, the confused, and the stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
There's such a thing as braille. Blind people can actually read you know. They can even post on Slashdot with the right software.
paper ballots and electronic voting can coexist! (Score:2)
The trick is to print the vote out and let the voter see it as it prints. The voter will not be able to touch the vote, only see it. Before the voter leaves the booth the vote gets rolled up. N
Hard? Ha ha. (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Not the stupid punch card ballots with the hanging chads. Pen and paper. In Canada during federal elections, anyone can supervise the vote counting. It's almost impossible to rig elections that are held this way.
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:3, Informative)
Each voting district has an elections officer who assembles the hardware. Then groups composed of all parties do the actual work of taking the vote and counting the results. All the parties involved are at the count and it's pretty well impossible to spin the result.
As this happens at an individual poll level it will scale effortlessly. We get our hand counted results about 3 -4 hours after the polls close.
It'll never
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
They can't wait a few hours?
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:3)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
But let me put it this way. I live in Ohio. There was a precinct upstate who didn't turn their tallies in until 9 am the next morning after the 2004 elections. This made the news, in other counties (such as mine). They were repremanded by state politicians about how this was unacceptable.
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Interesting... but that's, what, one out of how many in the state? Usually that won't affect the outcome, right?
In British elections, the polls are open all day Thursday (I have no idea why Thursday, AFAIK it's just traditional) and close at 10pm. Counting goes o
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
IIRC, this was the sort of place where Labour never had a significant share of the vote...
A bit of googlery reveals the details [wikipedia.org]. It was Winchester, in 1997.
The original result was Liberal 26,100, Tory 26,098, Labour 6,528. After the re-run, the result was Liberal 37,006, Tory 15,450 and Labour 944. Certainly some of those Labour votes wou
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:5, Insightful)
> People want election results fast
I disagree.
We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.
Go ahead, ask anyone: "Would you rather have poll results within an hour of the polls closing, with a 50% chance that they would be wrong, or have them within 3 days with a 0.00001% chance that they might be wrong?"
You can play with the times and percentages a bit, but I would bet cash money that most people want accuracy & precision, not speed.
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
I guess i would put it this way:
This is an issue of
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
> the pressure being placed on election boards are to make sure the job is done as fast as possible.
Now you've changed the subject. I've served on local election boards for the past 5 years, and of course there is pressure to work quickly. That's true in most enterprises, from MacDonald's to NASA.
But you have to distinguish between pressure and priority. Regardless of the pressure to get everything cheap & fast, the priority is still to make burgers that don't kill you, space flights that land sa
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
I disagree.
We may be told that we want results fast, but really we want them accurate.
Absolutely. The only people that want faster results are the news media.
Besides, a little inaccuracy makes a great news story, so its a bonus.
I'm perfectly content to hear about it the next day.
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
I do however think that it would be hard to get people to impliment such a system, and i'm trying to give you reasons how people might quibble.
Elections are complicated, even the simple things can g
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:3, Informative)
Referring to this as an oversight is tremendously rich, given that the County elections boards and the Secretary of State's offi
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Counting paper ballots is not a big issue, we use bank tellers. I have run elections with several thousand people voting, it is not a huge issue. The general election counts are run in essentially the same way.
I am very skeptical of this particular OSS projec
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2, Flamebait)
I don't recall, 30 or so per constituency but it certainly varies.
The main thing about paper ballots is that there is no variation in the ballot access by precinct. There is no way to pull the type of corruption the GOP pulled in Ohio, Ken Blackwell deliberately underequiping the polling booths in student areas so that there were people waiting to vote at 2am. There is no way to pull the type of corruption that Katheri
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
There's a cryptosystem to handle this (somebody fill in the name here).
Basically, you get a receipt with a code on it. It's one half of a pair. The administrator of elections gets the other half of the pair (in a log, for instance). Together, the two parts of the pair can recreate your ballot. Apart they're useless. So, you can't sell your vote, and the official can't determine how you voted, but if the election needs to
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2)
all a computer would do is be a glorified poll taker, the election would be certified from the print out s/receipts/ballots. The TV networks would get there instant election numbers with in x% error (really close to accurate), and the election would be certified off the paper ballots. You wouldn't track the votes at all.
I know in my home state, (illinois) we use punch cards, and the only way you can get a punch card is by go
What's the population of India? (Score:2, Informative)
"Elections in India are events involving political mobilisation and organisational complexity on an amazing scale. In the 1996 election to Lok Sabha there were 1,269 candidates from 38 officially recognised national and state parties seeking election, 1,048 candidates from registered parties, not recognised and 10,635 independent candidates. A total number of 592,572,288 people voted. The Election Commission employed almost 4,000,000 people to run the election. A vast num
Australia (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evoting [softimp.com.au]
Re:Australia (Score:3, Informative)
It's also worth noting that the eVACS system is free software under the GPL and you can get the source, and some more info, at the ACT Electoral Commission site [act.gov.au].
Relevant to the article!
Australian Voting Systems (Score:2)
IMHO it seems ideal to continue this tradition and look into the Aurtralian solution to electronic voting too.
Re:Australian Voting Systems (Score:2)
Easy formula (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Open source. We need to be able to trust these systems and how can we do that without being able to examine the code behind them?
2. Paper records kept for the government. Just in case there is a trust issue, this is a backup method for the recount.
3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.
So easy. I am all for having the convenience and speed of electronic voting, but I cannot for the life of me understand why we must give up the benefits of paper ballots at the same time, and even improve on them (as in the paper copy for the voter).
Re:Easy formula (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, I concur
2. Paper records kept for the government. Just in case there is a trust issue, this is a backup method for the recount.
So long as these records contain a human readable indication of an individual voter's intent, and were verified by the voter at vote-time.
3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.
Absolutely, uncategorically, under no circumstances. Proof of vote makes wholesale coercion, vote-buying and vote-selling methods practical.
Re:Printed Logs Not a solution (Score:2)
0) Its just less flawed, its a false sense of security.
1) Recounts are done from a paper log you can't review; multiple printouts. (1 voter, 1 official, 1 for election officials)
2) How many people can read the small print?
3) Will you have time enough to read it scrolling bye?
4) Will you see the last person's? (tons of white space + shield)
5) Will a bug or miss-configuration cause it to scroll past the viewable area?
6) What happens if the printer gets low o
Re:Easy formula (Score:2)
Re:Easy formula (Score:4, Informative)
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This used to be the standard, until they caught on to Big Business asking their employees to show them their voting receipt to make sure they were voting for the right candidate. Especially around the turn of the century, this became an effective way to abuse immigrant workers, who had little choice in employment and didn't know much about the political system.
The machine could be running different code. (Score:2)
Disclosed or open source is critical, but not sufficient, to be able to trust the system. Assuming you've already verified that the disclosed code is totally trustworthy (a big assumption), you need to also convince yourself that the electronic voting machine in the polling place is running that exact code.
"Trusted computing" might be a bad idea for desktop PCs (where th
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
Perhaps the author meant to say:
"no American vendor offers open source software and systems that are ready for voting."
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can also create a private company and buy a significant percentage of shares in it and sell the system to other states or countries. There are all sorts of govt-private partnerships all over the world like this.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
It's interesting to note that the source code includes a patch to rectify a bug found by a local University. The Uni (ANU+NICTA) took advantage of the free nature of the code and used it as a basis for formal code verification research. Score one for Free software.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
You know it's getting bad when the Americans need to start looking to Estonia for tools to build a better democracy...
Australian (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html [act.gov.au]
It is made in Australia, and I was of the impression has been used in elections already.
LetterRip
Re:Australian (Score:3, Informative)
[QUOTE]Within the world of electronic voting, though, eVACS (for "Electronic Voting and Counting System") has been a rare success story both for open source development methodology and for the benefits that electronic voting can offer. The first generation of eVACS (running on Debian Linux machines) was developed starting in March 2001 in response to a request for bids by the Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission (ACTEC), and it was done on a budget of only A
Why do people belive OSS == trustable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable? (Score:2, Insightful)
Spot on! Another question: How can you trust the net card (there was post not long ago about IPMI, and the potential for hiding complete remote control backdoors in network interfaces).
Then again, how can you trust humans to count perfectly?
What's wrong with paper
Nothing! Absolutely nothing. As much as my mom suggests I should write my masters or Ph.D thesis on "on-line voting", I relly think this is one of the areas
Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable? (Score:2)
Browsing through an introduction to cryptography will show you a large number of different different voting systems with different properties.
Of coruse, then the new question becomes how to manage PKI in a system which is understandable and easy for the entire population. (I'm sure a system can be made though.)
Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable? (Score:2)
Nobody said "OSS == trustable", you've created a straw man.
OSS is just more trustable as it's harder for the software writer to, accidentally or deliberately, pull a fast one.
There are still many potential problems that need to be addressed, as you and other posters have noted.
Open source is everything that closed source is. Plus the source is available.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers [wikipedia.org] fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD [wikipedia.org] too.
Re:Why do people belive OSS == trustable? (Score:2)
A CPU that mangles code, in any vote-altering way, without a consistent pattern of irregularities would cost more money than would be financially viable to produce and sell.
Nothing is wrong with paper ballots.
Paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
We make photo kiosks. Every time someone places an order, we print a receipt. The receipt printer is one of the most reliable pieces of equipment on our systesm. We have about 60 employees. If we can do it, I see no reason why you could not have a voting machine print a paper receipt with your voting selection on it along with a unique, encrypted number. On the way out, the voter places the receipt (or paper ballot, if you will) in the drop box. Once the election is over, if everyone is satisfied with the results, the paper ballots are discarded. If there is a challenge, the paper receipts are counted and compared to the digital count. There should not be much of a difference. If the difference is enough to change the outcome, I'd say go with the paper count. However, if voting fraud is an issue, it will not be a small margin. It is doubtful that someone will try to fraud for only a couple of votes and there should never be more pieces of paper in the box than digital votes cast.
This will allow for a challenge, investigation, and is the only way to provide for a recount.
Re:Paper trail (Score:5, Insightful)
Then clearly, you underestimate the skills and resources of your adversary. It is precisely small margins that are concerning. Remember, a small margin of votes can be changed in a close race without producing statistically significant differences from polling (and exit-polling) to raise suspicion. Such small changes, well placed, can have a significant effect on the overall race.
If you think that people do not have the skill to predict where small vote count frauds will make a difference, you need to visit the "gerrymandering" page on wikipedia, particularly the "Gerrymandering computer technology" heading.
Re:Paper trail (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's face it you could out and out rig the machines and nobody would care. This is america only 35% of people eligable for voting even care enough to stop by the polling place on the way from work.
Re:Paper trail (Score:2)
The OVC system is very much the traditional paper ballot system but with computer systems added to help voters (including voters with physical i
Privacy?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like paper ballots because they don't get traced back to you, once you put it in the box you have no identity.
Re:Privacy?? (Score:2)
Re:Privacy?? (Score:2)
Voting Machines are a Waste of Money (Score:4, Insightful)
I love a technofix as much as the next geek, but computerized voting machines are not the technology for now.
open source software in voting? (Score:3, Funny)
VOTER: "Huh, it's a command line terminal...Okay..."
Looks at people running the voting place
VOTER: "Excuse me. How do I vote....?...Uh huh...'ls'? Uh huh...'RFTM?' What does that mean...Oh I see. Thank you very much"
ls
VOTER: "Okay there's a file in here called README and INSTALL. I'll look at README first."
after some time...
VOTER: "Seams to be something about a pissed off guy named Richard and something he humps called a GNU...Okay. I'll take a look at INSTALL instead here"
VOTER: "Generic install instructions....something something something, configure....something something make? Okay worth a shot"
configure; make; make install
Checking for sed.....ok
Checking for awk.....ok
Checking for kernl...
30 mintues latter
Checking for libyourmom....ok
Checking for libkitchensick...Found Emacs....ok
Checking for ruby on rails....
ruby on rails not found...
ruby on rails not found.??
ruby on rails not found.??!!!!!!
RUBY ON RAILS NOT FOUND!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ruby on rails is the latest h4x0r dood!!!!!
Install Ruby rails AJAX0r!!!!
VOTER: "Son of a....!"
Working now in the Australian Capital Territor (Score:2, Redundant)
Details and code here [act.gov.au].
The worst part about OSS election software... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, you try to 'make uninstall' but the process fails halfway through and so you're left with a system in an unknown state, with rogue files hanging out everyyear.
But as Thomas Jefferson said, it's doubful that your current system will remain stable forever. Every once in a while you need to Reinstall the Operating System.
Re:The worst part about OSS election software... (Score:2)
Re:The worst part about OSS election software... (Score:2)
This is ridiculous, it really is. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason that implementing a transparent, auditable electronic voting system is such a problem is because there are certain people that have a vested interest in making it a problem.
I agree. (Score:4, Interesting)
These are a bit trickier than just building a machine that can add 1 to a column, but not THAT much harder.
I would ascribe every digital ballot paper with a hash value that uniquely identifies that paper and would be hard to forge. eg: Have each ballot paper marked with a serial number, then digitally signed by the electoral authorities.
Each voter's voting card would have a totally random public encryption key on it, plus a number. On going to the voting machine, the card would first tick the person off on the list of people who had voted. After casting the votes, the machine would encrypt the ballot paper with the encryption key, then it would append the number to the end. The electronic ballot paper would then, after a random delay, be sent back to the central repository via an SSL connection. The machine would keep no tallies and no records whatsoever. Nor would the local office. It would all be central. (The local office could count votes cast, though, as it would be useful to compare against votes decoded.)
The central system would use the number to select a relatively small set of private keys. It would try each key in turn until it found the key that unlocked that ballot paper. That private key would then be deleted. The unlocked ballot paper would be placed into a secure database. The number of valid votes identified would be counted and publicly published in real-time.
Just to be absolutely certain what is meant here, the database must be write-only from the central system and must be in a tamper-proof environment. Once all ballots are uploaded, it will then perform the count and download the results, ALL of the decrypted ballots and ALL of the encrypted ballots.
That way, anyone can perform a recount and although it would be a monumental task to validate the votes, it could be done. This system is pseudo-anonymous, not truly anonymous, using a VERY large base to make anonymity effective. The upshot is that if a random sample of voter cards were gathered (anonymously!), it would be possible to show that each of those cards matches to exactly one encrypted vote and one decrypted vote.
This shouldn't be necessary, as most of the avenues for fraud have already been eliminated. The effort to fraudulently enter a vote in this system would be extraordinary, as it would require breaking the ballot paper generation system, the encryption key system AND the decryption system, in order to be transparent. Failure to break all of these would result in the votes being rejected by the unbroken component.
I don't think an actual voting system need be this complex, but that's not the point. The point here is that it is possible to imagine a system that is (a) Open Source and (b) so damn-near impervious that it would be cheaper to just buy the person who'd been elected than rig so much as a single vote.
Has this been done? Probably not. Could it be done? Sure. Give me a couple of weeks, a few smart-cards, readers, kiosks and a tamper-proof computer case. There should be no difficulty in writing a system that would be close to iron-clad for the next 50-100 years, with so close to zero chance of tampering that it's just not going to happen.
If an OSS election system group has the hardware and would like to play with this scheme, I'd be happy to write it for them.
Large invest of time and money? WHY? (Score:2)
How much capital does an originization really need to code up a secure counting machine? I just don't get where all these costs are coming from. The thing is just supposed to simply count. How hard is it? A couple of geeks should be able to do it in an afternoon
Re:Large invest of time and money? WHY? (Score:2)
While implementing a voting system isn't as trivial as you make it sound, the cost isn't so much in the development of the software to implement voting as the political and certification processes to allow it to be used. It costs $millions to work with the states to get each state to modify their laws to allow for the use of a secure, open source voting system, and then to them get the system certified in each state. K
Who's ready? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is closed source ready for the polls?
What's the holdup? (Score:2)
I just don't get what the holdup is. I'll help out whoever wants to build one and write up the functional specs:
1. Present list of choices
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.
Re:What's the holdup? (Score:2)
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.
You forgot spec 5.
5. Do Not Oppose Any OCP Officer
India has a good system (Score:3, Interesting)
A simple, scalable, system.
Something stinks... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the money: this is the same country that has spent BILLIONS in Iraq for dubious reasons (the official reasons kept changing, so they can't have been the real reasons).
I heard one of the US Gov's "reasons" was to have democracy/free elections in Iraq, but that can't be the real reason since the US Gov was very obviously not pleased when there was democracy/free elections in Palestine and Hamas got elected
I don't know what is really going on with the USA, but I doubt that the main issue is whether a voting system is OSS or non-OSS.
With all this "globalisation" being hyped as such a great thing, maybe the US should outsource their elections to India, and have UN observers for free to observe stuff.
After all India is arguably the world's largest democracy (1 billion citizens). I bet if they had results as ridiculous as "more votes than voters", "negative votes" heads would _literally_ roll. They somehow have managed to get a decent chap as Prime Minister ( Dr. Manmohan Singh seems to be well-respected by most).
If I were a US citizen I'd _demand_ that all the people involved in supplying or approving crappy election systems be charged for _TREASON_.
After all, the USA keeps saying democracy is so important etc.
Prove it with actions and not bullshit.
Inspection is not enough. (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
Not only does maintaining "intellectual property [gnu.org] rights" not preclude others from distributing copies of the software for a fee (as anyone who understands Free Software licensing already knows), merely inspecting the software is insufficient to get real work done in a way that is beneficial to the public.
I served on the Champaign County election equipment advisory board—an appointed board made up of representatives of businesses and political parties from Champaign County, Illinois. Over months in the past couple of years this board weighed a few machines from a variety of vendors so that we could make a recommendation to the elected County Board who would then make the final decision and sign the appropriate contracts. We were told at the first meeting that we were only to consider machines from "approved vendors" but in the end we learned that even the machines we were considering had not yet all been approved by the State of Illinois. It was just a means of narrowing the allowable debate, effectively excluding a variety of vendors who probably never knew we were seriously considering voting machines.
I knew early on (and did my darndest to convince my fellow board members) that we want complete source code to the machines we'd buy so that we could make repairs and improvements while enjoying the benefits of global competition. Locally we have lots of talented computer programmers, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is in this county. It is a shame to waste all the talent we have by getting into a monopoly.
Politically, there are good reasons to need the source code too: it's your machine paid for with your tax dollars, so you should not be restricted from getting it fixed when it breaks, running it any time you want, and not just inspecting what it ostensibly does. But we should also not constrain ourselves to the features the machine has today. Locally, we could switch from a first-past-the-post to some kind of ranked voting system (like instant run-off or some Condorcet system) for local elections. But so long as we can't get the vendor to do what we want and as long as we can't help ourselves because we're choosing to buy into a monopoly for support (which is what you do when you get proprietary software), we have an additional restriction to overcome with our voting machines—we can't switch to the voting system we want because the proprietor won't let us and we can't afford to simply switch to another set of machines.
I discussed Free Software voting machines on Counterpunch [counterpunch.org].
Graphical Voter Interface (GVI) (Score:2)
GVI, The Graphical Voter Interface, is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for voting, suitable for use in private or public elections. Although it could be adapted for online voting, it is currently intended only for conventional "precinct" voting. For security reasons, GVI does not require that the voter have access to a keyboard. It can handle write-ins and multi-language elections, and it can automate voting along party lines. GVI can be used for Condorcet Voting and Instant Runoff
"Traditional electronic voting systems" (Score:2)
Traditional voting systems put up with the delays of moving physical ballots around and counting them by hand because the process is too important to be defined by the desire of TV networks to sell advertising on election night.
We'd be better off enacting a one week news blackout on election results than going to ANY kind of electronic voting system, even one that retained the essential primacy of the paper ballot.
Open Source Voting in Canada? (Score:2)
Could anyone elaborate on the Canadian system?
I Disagree (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that, with an OSS voting system, if there's a problem with the code, the public will (be able to) know about it.
Compare that to Diebold and ask yourself how likely it is that they'd be forthcoming with crucial details if and when something goes haywire with their electronic voting machines.
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:2)
How? How do you know the code running on any particular machine or within any process in the system hasn't been temporarily tampered with? How do you monitor the states of every function in the system in real time? How do you know if your monitor isn't being fed fake data?
You can't lock up a system if a motivated someone wants to subvert it, and knows what he's doing.
Paper ball
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:2)
How would you notice the difference if there where an alien code like:
And don't speak about md5sum to check it, how could you be sure to be running the right md5sum software ?
Label me paranoiac, I must be because I am into network security, but keep in mind that it is the government that organize the elections and chose the voting
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:5, Funny)
The (software|hardware) is only as smart as the person operating it.
The same could be said for democracy...
Re:OSS ready for the polls (Score:2)
How Belgium does it. (Score:2, Interesting)
The major part of the votes since more then five years have been entered electronically.
The majority of the systems are made by Steria (formally, Integris, a part of Bull) http://www.steria.be/ [steria.be]
The system consits of PC running some old M$ DOS version (4.5 I think) with a pen-screen and a magnetic card reader.
Secrecy of vote + audit trail: each voter gets one anonymous card. The card is writtten using the voting computer (in a ballo
This is more than an "OSS" issue (Score:2)
I'm a professional software developer, and my wife has a masters degree in political management and a lot of real-world experience in DC and elsewhere. Still I'm in no way qualified to write a requirements document for a voting system. Sure, the obvious things like "count the votes correctly" are easy, but there i
Re:Get some decent candidates (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Get some decent candidates (Score:3, Informative)
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp [crp.org] , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:
- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in ho
Re:Get some decent candidates (Score:2)
It's damn hard to argue that litigation is good for our society.
Re:Get some decent candidates (Score:2)
that would ruin us (Score:2)
(and no, it isn't right or good, because this perpetuates and increases the inequality)
With the electoral college, your vote is MORE likely to count. ("count" being that it tips the scale, such that voting the other way would have changed the result) This is a matter of math.
What we really need to do is break up a few of the lar
Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform (Score:2, Insightful)
This is my idea of a reform:
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electronic balloting system:
user arrives at poll place
receives magnetic card with one-way hash of ssn.
user swipes card in cardreader at ballot box
this initiates the voting. touch screens or pushbuttons, etc
no records are kept at all at the ballot box.
Votes are immediatly printed twice via a standard receipt printer in human readable format.
There is also an XML translation of the vote wi
Re:Should be part of more sweeping election reform (Score:2)