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Weblog:   E-Republic or B-Republic?
Subject:   Make it open source
Date:   2004-05-28 15:57:22
From:   Chirael
Response to: Make it open source

After thinking about this some more, why not have a petition to make any e-voting system open source so it's completely transparent. A petition to require a paper receipt will treat the symptom, not the problem.


As Black Box Voting page says, "The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes are allowed to be held as 'trade secrets.' Can citizen's groups examine them? No. The companies that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret. Can citizen's groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at all..."


Let's have a petition to prevent the voting process from being a "trade secret".
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  • Make it open source
    2004-05-31 11:48:04  Michael Brewer [Reply | View]

    I agree that any e-voting system should be open source. However, what I think is the problem is that government wants someone to supply them with a voting solution -- just as has been done in the past with paper systems. Unfortunately, the companies supplying e-voting solutions aren't interested in open source at all.

    There are three avenues that I see for open source voting systems:

    The first would be to have the federal government develop its own open source solution with or without assistance from external developers.

    The second is for a group of enterprising individuals to develop open source voting software and form an organization around delivering complete solutions to county governments.

    The last avenue is for citizens to gather support for state legislation that would require any computerized voting system to be fully transparent down to the source code.
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