Open Voting at OSCON

fmclain writes "The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) which has already been mentioned here will be demonstrating its open source voting system, which includes a voter verifiable paper trail, at this year's OSCON in Portland. The Mercury News (free reg.) describes this as the touch-screen holy grail. Given Diebold's troubles in California this can't come too soon. The OVC has already demonstrated a working system in Sacramento."

Comments

Voter registration fraud

[persaud]

Is at least as important as a paper trail. Since we already have systems that have a paper trail (i.e. paper ballots), computers could be better used to improve the accuracy and reliability of the voter registration process. This would reduce tampering by hostile insiders *and* outsiders.

This is the perfect market open source

[91degrees]

Traditional software companies hate open-source software because no one owns it or collects royalties for it.

sigh... They really don't get it. Unlike Windows XP, or Adobe Photoshop, voting software requires very limited runs, and typically needs to recover its cost on its first sale. There's no need to make revenue on a per copy basis. There is probably only going to be a single customer who will have precise demands. If it was closed source, the amount of work would be the same, and the amount and so that you could charge would be the same.

Companies really need to get over the idea that because code costs money to produce, it must have value. Sometimes it is the case. Often it isn't.

Re:Whoop de do

[koreth]

Until pressing a button is as secure as writing (or punching) your vote on paper and dropping it in to a box, e-voting won't be mainstream.

So India's 100% electronic general election, underway as I type this, is just a figment of South Asia's collective imagination? How much more "mainstream" than the entire electorate of a democracy three times as populous as the US can e-voting get?

Paper votes aren't always secure either

[feepcreature]

Until pressing a button is as secure as writing (or punching) your vote on paper and dropping it in to a box, e-voting won't be mainstream. You can't hook up a wire to a box to change all the votes inside can you?

True, you can't change paper votes by wire, but there are lots of traditional methods for interfering with paper votes:

• replace the ballot box with "one I prepared earlier"
• steal the box altogether
• manually stuff lots of extra votes into it
• nobble voters
• register extra voters
• don't register some real voters
• impersonate real voters (especially dead ones still on the register, or sick or apathetic ones)
• etc...

A fair and free vote requires confidence in the mechanism, but also in the count, and the officials, and the register, and lots of other parts of the process.

In some countries, hacking electronic machines might be one of the harder ways to steal an election :-(