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Should Voting Software Be Open Source?
jallen02 asks: "CNN has a quick little piece in their technology section about the electronic voting systems and their security. They ask, 'What about security?' with regards to the electronic voting systems. And then a researcher from AT&T labs is quoted in the article. Basically, saying the systems should be open sourced, and he quotes the party line for open source regarding security: more eyeballs means more flaws are found and fixed. The big question raised here is ripe for debate.. should electronic voting systems software be opened for the public to see?"
It's a nice thought: it would make a good high-profile proof of concept that could give open source the credibility it needs to succeed in the doggy-dog software market.
My only concern is that current open source methodologies may not be able to deliver the robustness and security required in a voting situation. Open source becomes strong through evolution, which necessarily means that the first users experience a lot of minor bugs that eventually get ironed out. Highly reliable bullet-proof systems need to be designed from the ground up.
We don't depend on open source for controlling drawbridges or handling air traffic control systems, and we shouldn't put something as fragile as our democracy in the hands of open source, either. It is not acceptible for my vote to be lost because of a bad fsck.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
People don't vote because they don't trust the system. If the system were more open, Democracy might actually mean something.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
no, no, no, no, no!
Open source is GREAT for some applications, and it's totaly inapropreate for others. Yes, lots of flaws would be fixed... but lots of other flaws would be discovered by the WRONG people and exploited. I remember a story on slashdot a while ago further back in the Mircosoft trial where someone high up on the MS chain said that releasing the source of Windows would provide to be a threat to national security because of all the security flaws. While I'm sure these voting systems have much fewer if any bugs releasing the source would allow groups of hackers to work from their homes studying the code and checking for insecuritys. While at the moment, voting equipment is secured and hackers wouldn't be able to have long-term access to it let alone it's source code.
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What is there to ensure that the manfucaturer actually installed the OS voting software, rather than a slightly tweaked version?
You need open installation, open distribution, open setup, open guards, open data transmission/collection and open results. Otherwise there is no assurance.
Only having many eyeballs on the system all the way from start to finish will give a level of security sought by this sort of endevour.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
If the software is being created by counties with tax dollars, isn't it required to be not only "Open Source", but public domain as well?
Why is voting so freaking hard? Why not have a federal project to develop a decent piece of software that all counties around the country could use if they wanted. Voting software isn't Hard. It's really not. Do it once, do it right, no more problems.
Somehow PGP and GPG are open source, and somehow no one call the security of these tools into question. The only reasons you don't want to offer the source is if 1) there are security holes, or 2) you have no intention of fixing the security holes.
The problem here is that the system involves hardware -- which will likely not be open source because of patent constraints, and that it should allow the voter 1) to remain anonymous, 2) to provide a method for the voter to double-check their votes prior to submission, and 3) to provide a method for the voter to verify that their votes were cast and counted correctly in the final totals. All of this means that it can't be a purely electronic method. The voter must take away something with them.
If something like this -- the combination of open source software and patent-free hardware could be assembled, at a reasonable, inexpensive price, it would be a wonderful gift to the democracies of the world.
--computerised voting is the last straw on any sort of honest voting. Once you have this in by law, that's it, kiss any sort of honesty goodbye. It's not needed. Punch out chads aren't needed. Paper ballots, fill in the circle, works just great. Ya, takes some time to count, but human eyeballs are plenty "open source". All this latest touch screen voting did was make it ridiculously easy to stuff the ballot box by *someone*, or to alter the results, or to lose them, or whatever. No "poll watcher" can count anything-you rely on what the machine tells you. And if the stuffing is occurring INSIDE the governmental command and control structure, well, you can see where that's headed. Votes were difficult in the past, granted, some fraud occurred, this new tech mandates the possibility oif universal fraud. Gee, wonder why the arkansas mafia/skull and bones axis of political crooks would both advocate this sort of voting?
I got my "I voted" sticker right here from the latest election. It's a picture of the computer touch screen pointing at itself saying "I voted". Well, that's exactly what's happening, some computer is voting, you surely aren't.
An interesting issue with regards to Voting software versus your general peice of software is the time-of-use.
Voting software will be used *once* and *suddenly* every five or so years.
This has huge implications for bugs and security.
No matter how much alpha/beta testing you do, some things just arent gonna be picked up untill the first election.
And that could be a security flaw. So in the case of voting software, one of the standard arguments of the "security through obscurity camp" could be relevant: Any 0-day exploit that a black hat discovered wont be used untill the election is in progress. Therefore, it may be useful to hide the source code from black hats. With normal OSS, black hats do find bugs that others have missed. But fortunately this is often early in a product cycle and get fixed very quickly (a good reason for OSS). With an election system, these bugs just arent gonna be picked up quick enough - it will be too late already....
Not too sure if this argument makes any sense, and I think somebody should really counter this please.....
But it is an issue, a special aspect of such software.
Right. But nobody said life is fair. Try going into the Pentagon/CIA/NSA/FBA and tell them you want to "independently audit the tools used to enstil the power structure"
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
It's funny that this debate rages in a country that has seen severe problems with a severely outdated and erroneous voting infrastructure. Nobody has problems there with (proprietary) punch card machines but as soon as computers are involved everybody gets worried. Arguably it wasn't technology that failed during the last elections but the process after the election during which both parties spent several millions on campaigns trying to prove that they won rather than just recounting the votes (which was an option all along) or holding a state wide reelection (which even in third world countries is common practice in case of doubt).
I'm sure there is room for an open source voting system next to the many excellent commercial products available (which outside the US are widely being used and which tested in practice). Let the market decide. Let the government focus on certification rather than specific products. Voting machines (electronic and mechanical) should meet certain standards with respect to reliability, ease of use, accessibility, acceptable margin of error etc. Any standard in this area is better than none (which currently seems to be the case).
People trust their life to certified proprietary medical software, nasa launches billions worth of equipment using certified proprietary software, if you travel by car, you are using tons of certified proprietary embedded software. The keyword is certification. We trust this software because independent third parties have assessed that the software does what it advertises to do in a sufficiently reliable fashion.
Certification is currently uncommon in commercial software engineering. Not in the last place because most so called software engineers are not even qualified to tie their shoelaces properly. Any idiot who has read VB for dummies can claim to be a software engineer.
Jilles
I think this is the most clear-cut case of the need for open source. But the argument that open-source is bug-free is a fallacy. The reason voting software should be open source is for security. Giving a private company the ability to create voting software that is not reviewed by at least the government, and better yet, the people, would be a security risk. An earlier post says:
Open source has nothing to do with any "methodology." It just means you give out the dang code! Most commericial outfits use a specific development methodology. Something like: proposal-requirements-design-implementation-testin g. There is no reason you could not do retain this process while developing open-source.
If we don't do this, nothingkeeps an outfit from producing code that says:
if (date == "2004-Nov-05") { vote = "cowboyNeal"; }No amount of quality testing can uncover such bugs. Only peer-review can ensure public safety.
And let us not forget that there has been tampering with voters, tally's and what-not, since the concept of democratic voting was first invented. The imfamous 1930's era mobsters come to mind first.
Secure? Not likely. Nothing is 100% secure. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional! The key here is to empower the people to keep the system just. Keeping the people out of the loop and preventing them from seeing the code that allows them to vote is wrong. They will never trust the system then.
As for MS's security woes. It's their own fault. They hopped on the Internet Bandwagon as an after thought when Win95 came out. And they have since built more and more holes in their swiss cheese OS. Only now do they consider Security. I bet the engineers at MS, when asked about security responded, "Security is not my job. It's the security group's responsibility to secure the code."
Security is an issue and always will be. But the needs of the people are more important. Democracy must be maintained and if the people don't trust the system, then democracy has failed.
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
The United States seems to have a strange infatuation with weird voting technology: levers, punch cards, touch screens, etc. And look at where it's gotten you (see: florida(twice), virginia, etc.)
How about paper and pencil? During the last Canadian federal election 13 million votes were counted in 4 hours, by hand.
If you have a system that works efficently, with little concerns of errors or security, do you really think *any* software is going to improve it????
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