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Weblog:   E-Republic or B-Republic?
Subject:   Make it open source
Date:   2004-05-28 15:34:33
From:   Chirael
There's an excellent article about an open source e-voting system in Australia, >Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting.


Making electronic voting, which should be completely transparent like any voting process IMO, open source just seems so obvious and I'm amazed that I don't see it mentioned at all in most of the articles on this topic (e-voting in the U.S.).


If it's open source and votes are digitally signed, then I think there's also 1) less of a need for a paper receipt, and 2) an easier way to do receipts if we must have them (just digitally sign the receipt the voter gets so it matches the one stored to disk).


Floppies are indeed a very fragile method of storing data; I cringe whenever I hear someone say the only copy of [important document] is on a floppy. In the Australian system linked above it sounds like they wrote votes to two disks per machine, but now that wireless networking is so pervasive and relatively cheap it might be better to just store it on a server over a wireless network for later upload.
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  • Make it open source
    2004-05-28 15:57:22  Chirael [View]

    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".
    • Make it open source
      2004-05-31 11:48:04  Michael Brewer | [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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