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NYT Calls For Open-Source Election Machines
anti-drew writes "The New York Times Magazine has an interesting editorial (free reg. req.) calling for open-source voting machines. From the article: 'Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but only if we adopt the techniques of the 'open source' geeks.' That's quite an endorsement coming from the Times. Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'.
The same NY Times that got Adrian Lamo busted while he found a f**king open-proxy on their network.
First Vote?
It's most definitely not an "endorsement from the Times." Unless the Op-ed was written by the Times editorial board, it will have a disclaimer stating that the statements contained herein only represent the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Times or its parent corporations.
MSDN Magazine has an article calling for closed source voting machines with .NET Passport validation.
Unknown host pong.
That comment reminds me of a history book of Las Vegas which noted the distrust that regular gamblers had against the electronic one armed bandits, who much preferred the electromechanical machines.
Use google and google at the prompt.
I am pro-lifechoice.
'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power' i thought we were socialists? what's nutty about being suspicious of centralized power? it would be naive not to be. read a frickin history book. (or a newspaper, for that matter)
I think it's a great idea... not a new one but it's probably new to the general public and the NYT clearly thinks there's nothing wrong with free registration required so there you have it! A national publication force supporting a public-trust open-source project. It's the only way to help ensure the public's interests are protected against corruption.
But the machines themselves are only part of the process. There must be audit and process supervision and that still requires people.
Of course, one of the justifications was that open-source enthusiasts are 'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'."
For once they hit the nail on the head. Although I don't see why anyone might consider the statements to be any sort of insult. The so called "libertarian freaks" are just doing what every citizen should be doing: always questioning "centralized power". Technically, we give them the power, so why not ask why?
Click here
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I could be mistaken, but wouldn't open source code for voting machines make it that much easier for someone to hack the machines if they so desired?
Wouldn't open source code for an operating system make it that much easier for someone to the hack a computer if they so desired?
The thing with open source voting machines is that anyone should be able to look at the code and notice a bug that would allow this. With closed source voting machines like Diebold's, the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it.
I think a strong argument that you could put forward would be that the current system of manually counting votes is the equivalent of 'open source'. Everyone knows what they do (count votes), and how they do it (by looking at each one and recording the number). I believe you can even watch them do it, if you'd like. Open source is pretty much the equivalent. You can see what the code is doing, and how it's doing it.
Speak before you think
alas, my memory fails me yet again (please, no lame 'upgrade' jokes), i know my explanation will suck due to lack of facts, but here ya are anyway;
there was *some guy* who placed some code into a compiler once, so that even if there was no malicious code in the actual souce, once compiled, the executable had a block of code enabling the original author to do things (i.e. a backdoor). if i remember correctly, even if you were to recompile the compiler, the code would once again be placed into the compiler (and therefore future copies of the executable), i know its extremely unlikely that it will happen in this case, but im just pointing out that it can happen.
It's an interesting piece, but it's not an editorial. An editorial states the opinion of the newspaper as a whole (actually of the Editorial Board, if you're feeling pedantic) and as such carries a fair amount of weight, as in saying, for example, "The New York Times has endorsed Kerry for President." This is just an opinion piece by one of the paper's writers, and is a lot lower on the food chain than an editorial.
A long time ago, Linus Torvalds gave an interview in Maximum PC in which he pointed out that some people thought that open source "somehow was tied to communism." This type of thinking is still around, I think, and it's part of what fuels the Ken Browns and Darl McBrides of the world. They see something that looks a little like something they've been trained to hate with unreasoning passion, and then the blinders go on and the brains turn off.
Fortunately, I think that people are finally starting to understand exactly what the open source software movement stands for and the benefits we stand to accrue from it. 'Communism' - either in its real form or the corrupted understanding that some people seem to have of it - simply doesn't enter into the equation anymore. Open source, to many mostly computer illiterate people that I know, looks much more like an exercise in free speech than an expression of the Marxist dialectic.
Open source voting software is the best way to deal with the problems in electronic voting machines. Will it be an absolute panacea? Probably not. But in any case, it will doubtless produce more trustworthy software than anything produced by a proprietary company using proprietary software development methods on a proprietary operating system with proprietary political causes and motivations.
You sir, are a dumbass.
It would be HARDER to hack an open source voting machine for several reasons.
First: Security holes WOULD get fixed. Diebold leaves their machines open to known exploits.
Second: If the machines were open source, you can bet your complacent American ass that every CompSci doctorate student or professor would try and hack it for prestege, then submit a patch to fix it. All that BEFORE an election.
Third: At least we would know how the machinese worked. Currently our knowledge consists of: The Machines fuck Up.
Fourth: we might get a paper trail. Florida election fuckups would no longer exist.
Yes. We all know that security by obscurity is one of the best methods of ensuring that systems are secure. That is why nobody has ever been able to hack into a system running closed-source software such as Microsoft Windows.
Sarcasm aside, if the software is not open-source, there will still be many, many people that will have access to the code. The difference is that the general public won't be able to check what the code does. Are you sure that you trust every employee of Diebold (for instance) to be honest?
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
No mention of an open-source voting project currently gathering a lot of support. Their idea is to keep what people trust about voting, and just computerize the parts that will make the process easier and more accessable.
Open Voting Consortium
librertarian freaks? i think not. i'm a compasionate conservative anarchist.
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I wrote something about this in my blog a while ago. I think putting your trust in the public is exactly what needs to be done. don't you?
...that the source made available is actually the code running on the machine?
...but that wouldn't actually make it Linux.
I could write a closed-source proprietary OS and have it go:
printf("Kernel version: Linux 2.4.26\n");
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I guess they read
If 10 voting equipment vendors publish their open source (remember, "open source" is not necessarily "free") software for inspection, then for each vendor, the other 9 vendors will have a strong incentive to inspect and criticize that 10th vendor's code. ("You really should want to buy *my* voting machines . . . their code sucks. Here, let me prove it. . .
I predict that competing commissioned salespeople can be even more nutty, suspicious, and enthusiastic than computer science professors.
Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology
I'm sure a lot of geeks will be convinced that the voting software would be safe if all the able coders can look at the voting software at their leisure and find bugs, if any. However, how do you convince the general populace this? Just saying there are random people in the world finding bugs in it doesn't seem convincing enough to a normal person who knows nothing about computers except that they can use it to get email and buy flowers. While I'm all for open source voting, I think it doesn't inspire the amount of trust necessary or as much trust as most Slashdot readers would think.
Already, Australians have used the open-source strategy to build voting software for a state election, and it ran like a well-oiled Chevy.
The last Chevy I owned was a '74 Vega, and it burned a quart of oil every 100 miles. I guess that's what he's referring to here.
Have you read my blog lately?
One of the biggest problems with voting machines is cost per use. Voting machines are relatively" expensive and are used at most twice a year, and often only once every 2-4 years. If they aren't being used, they are simple taking up room in storage (which costs money).
Cost Advantages:
NOW as distros like knoppix have proven, putting a full featured desktop on a CD is possible. That being said - putting your "voting machine" on a CD, and using standard PC hardware makes a lot of sense. You don't have to buy a bunch of larg proprietary machines that only get used ones in a while. The CD's can be verified. If one is careful it would even be easy to use hardware already in place - or obsoleted hardware. Such a system would also use a simple standard printer to print an encrypted voter verification (audit) record in case a recount is requested. This should eliminate the long standing problem with most other electronic voting systems (no real audit trail).
Development is spread out over a large not for profit group of programmers with the end result being free. The only real cost is the certification procedure each state decides to institute - and thus it is the state that becomes accountable. If a states procedures are not robust enough to catch dangerous bugs then it's their own fault. I would think that several states go in together and split the certification costs. Since the buy in price is almost nothing (essentially media) the states have more money to play with and spend on voter training AND certification.
Considering Diebold and others - this seems like a natural, easy and simple solution.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country - Come up with a simple, secure, reliable voting system on a CD that will boot from standard PC hardware.
SIDE NOTE: If my county uses electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail - then I will vote by absentee ballot. I would STRONGLY urge any US voter to do the same.
cluge
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
voting machines. Someone has to provide tech support in case something goes wrong, or barring being able to fix it, idemnity. And who better to do that than the people who made the code?
Just because something is OS doesn't mean that everyone is going to steal your trade secrets. If I were on a local voting comittee, I would almost certainly give the contract to the developer, because their people have the most experience with the machines.
Food for thought for Diebold, but who am I kidding. It will take a long time before people come to see open source as something more than just a bunch of punk kids who don't know how to make money.
Publically verifiable code. Sure. The geeks who can read and understand it will, far more than current distros and projects. If only for the novelty.
But then what is needed is a strict, multiparty custody chain, to ensure that the specific, compiled, verified code, as well as the machines it is run on, are what was actually verified.
it does no good to verify codebase X, if what finds its way to the machines is codebase Y
libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'
Hmmm...
libertarian...
suspicious of centralized power...
scream to high heaven if there is a loophole in the democratic system...
Wow, three compliments in a row, Thanks NYT!!!
There is a growing consensus that, in order to be trustable, election machines have to produce a paper ballot that can be hand-counted in case a recount is required. See, for example this article for a authoritative discussion of the issues by a recognized expert in the field.
Have you read my blog lately?
Its unfortunate the U.S. is just waking up to the massive threat evoting poses to democracy. As slowly as most local governments move I wager most of them are going to go in to the next election with machines that are easily rigged. I would now lob out the conspiracy theory that the Republican's are going to use them to steal the next election but I'm starting to have my doubts. If the Republican's hold the White House and both houses of Congress, and even better achieve their holy grail of a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, which is where I think rigged voting machines is most likely to come in to play, the next election will be meaningless because the Republican's will have a defacto dictatorship in place by then, especially if they are blessed with another 9/11 they can use as an excuse to trash whats left of the constitution.
The doubts I have about this scenarios is that I'm of the opinion the election was really stolen when the media, the DNC and DLC moved Kerry from also ran to front runner and all the Democratic primary voters followed along like so many lemmings.
With Kerry as the Democratic nominee we are faced with a situation where Bush may win no matter how awful a job he does, or how dangerous he is, because no one can stand Kerry, especially after the Republican's shred him with $200 million in attack ads. He is unfortunately a two faced hypocrite and totally unlikable. I'm pretty sure Karl Rove danced a jig in the White House when Kerry moved to front runner status. I find myself hoping that the Democrats will come to their senses at the convention in Boston and realize what a loser he is and throw the nomination to Edwards. He may be inexperienced but at least he is likable in a Clintonesque sort of way.
If Kerry does win I doubt the establishment will mind, he is after a spoiled rich kid and member of Skull and Bones so he will look out for the establishment interests first, and the people's interest not at all(except to get reelected). He really doesn't seem to differ all that much from Bush. He's pretty much a fan of the war in Iraq, the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. He seems to be a fan of the Patriot act and intrusive big brother government, again the only time he wasn't was when that was necessary to get the Democratic nomination. As soon as he had the nomination sowed up he rushed to the center and his first proposal was for a tax cut for corporations. He is a man in the pocket of the establishment if there ever was one.
I hate to say it but democracy is in a state of complete collapse in the U.S. There is a very small group of powerful people who decide who will be on the ballot, the media en masse anoints them and by the time it gets to the voters they are little more than a rubber stamp.
Rigged, closed source evoting is just another level of control to make sure the American people don't make a mistake and elect somebody that might upset the apple cart.
You can look at Iraq at the moment and see this same process in action. Iraq was supposed to get sovereignty and a U.N. representative was supposed to choose an interim government. Instead the U.S. appointed Iraqi governing council suddenly picked the government with massive back stage manipulation from the U.S. and surprise, surprise they are picking a man who has been on the CIA payroll for years as prime minister. He is a carbon copy of Chalibi who was the U.S. man until he fell in to disfavor. The U.S. is even interfering in the choice of the figurehead president to make sure he is pro U.S. versus the previous frontrunner who wasn't entirely a fan of U.S. occupation.
Our government is great with the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy but if we ever found a way to actually get it they would freak and the current plutocracy would put a stop to it in a heartbeat. I find myself truly wishing Nader had a shot at the Presidency. He would be a train wreck but it would upset a very entrenched and corrupted kleptocracy. I'd just like to see it and we could start a pool on how long he would last before he was assassinated.
@de_machina
As bad as the old punch card system were, I liked the feeling of knocking out a chad, and then being able to see an actual physical representation of my vote.
With the amount that counties are already spending on these machines, it can't cost much more to add a printer.
sorry 'bout the mess...
At first I was going to say "Of course the government should adopt open source voting machines," but then I looked at the current situation:
* The government doesn't display the diagrams to locks it has in its buildings.
* Most of our miltary documents and weapondry are completely classified (can you tell me what exactly Area 51 does)?
* Some of our most cherished documents (like the Constitution) are protected by systems meant to place them underground in the event of a nuclear war (Google it). But how exactly does it work? Who has access to the documents afterwards? The secret shadow government that's up and running in case of an emergency (Google it).
Fact is, very little of government is open source anythin. And yet the US has gotten along for over 200 years. While that doesn't necessarily mean things have been done "correctly", it does mean they've been sufficient enough to keep the country going. The chances we're going to change course now is unlikely.
If you can't trust the public with information about voting machines, why trust them to elect our leaders at all?
In Australia voters get a piece of paper and a pen.
Uh.............. that's it.
The counting takes a lot less time than it took the New York Times to organize the Florida recount, and the method supports unlimited error checking.
...because Microsoft would be in charge of validating our ballots!
I suspect that it would be however wrote the best worm that would control the election.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"the only ones who know if there's some backdoor or buggy code are the people who programmed it."
A correct statement but in need of a slight clarification. The only people who are likely to know about intentional rigging are the ones who do the build that actually gets installed in the machines. I imagine most of the geeks who developed the software in Diebold's machine would have no clue about any wrongdoing. The rigging is more likely to be done by a group resembling Nixon's plumbers who are highly loyal, believe what they are doing is right in some twisted way and able to keep secrets.
Thats why its extremely disturbing to hear about massive last minute changes in the software loads on Diebold's machines in the eleventh hour before the 2002 election in Georgia, which resulted in a stunning Republican upsets for the Senate and Governor, or in the last election in California.
@de_machina
Mark an X, punch a hole in a piece of paper, write a name...and a bunch of your fellow citizens (from all sides of the political spectrum) count them, by hand. Any questions - "I demand a recount!"
Only recently has it gone into a black box. The magical computer.
A move to continue the 'openness' would be advisable, no matter what the technology.
And there's a reason the exact capabilities of military weapons are classified. If someone were to want to attack you, would you want them to know the exact maximum range of your guns and where they are deployed?
They'd just be under /dev/null
Actually, regular voting is open source if you think about it. The ballot is checked off and goes into a box Everyone can see the process and how it works. Using proprietary machines is like giving your vote to an employee of a private company who hauls them off in a van and then reports the tally. If these machines were based off open source software, then you could possibly have a huge number of developers working on the project in their spare time that diebold could never compete with. Think of how many people would be going through the code to find mistakes.
I don't think we should imediatley switch over, but slowly as to allow many people the chance to look over the code and find bugs or backdoors. The system doesn't need to be that overly complicated either. We're not talking about installing a huge linux environment on these but rather something from emebeded linux.
Going open source shouldn't be the issue here, it's why we went to a closed source like diebold that is what's the question.
Electronic voting machines need to make human readable paper ballots that *can* be hand-counted. Anything short of that opens up the elections to all sorts of tampering that can be undiscoverable, even if the code is "open source."
You can collect the votes, in a variety of electronic methods, that will meet the needs of quick reporting, but ultimately the votes need to be auditable, which means being able to recount by some manual method.
The ballots need to be human readable so that they can be verified by the voter AND the auditor.
If the protocol is secure, then it doesn't matter if the code is open source, or closed source. Whatever. As a taxpayer, I would hope that they choose something that is as inexpensive as possible that provides a secure and auditable voting record.
"I could be mistaken,"
You were correct until you got past that first comma.
You seem to be missing the point of open source software. Anyone with the interest to do so can look at the code. If there is an exploitable flaw, it will be spotted and corrected. If the system allows someone to rig it to favor a certain candidate, that also will be spotted.
Only on
the answer is to NEVER USE COMPUTING DEVICES for voting (unless they are used to create a physical artifact like a punch card).
It doesn't matter if the code is open or closed. All the open code does is make it cheaper, simpler and probably more well-audited. But that doesn't solve the fundamental problems: nobody can ever know what goes on inside of a computer.
You don't know if the code you compiled from the voting machine website is the same as the code on the machine. Even if you got a computer expert to recompile all the code for all the machines and check with MD5, you still have no idea that the machine's screen isn't *lying* to you.
Human beings can't see bits and bytes and electronics. But they can see holes in a punch card or marks on a scantron. If the election is contested you can still count by hand, 50 times if you need to.
Open source software, great, sure, but make sure there's a paper trail!
If every one of these voting machines printed out a line on some old dot-matrix printer in another room the instant every vote was cast, a technical difficulty would be a minor inconvenience instead of the catastrophe it is now, due to the audit trail. Cringely hints as much in this column: No Confidence Vote: Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable
I mean, they are a democracy that's voting population absolutely dwarfs the US of A.
THey have an electronic system that, although not impervious to fraud, is simple, elegant, and cheap, and gets the job done. The systems are so simple that it would be very difficult in practice to actually cheat.. and if you could doctor one machine, the damage you could do would be quite limited.
>I could be mistaken, but wouldn't open source code for voting machines make it that much easier for someone to hack the machines if they so desired?
To amend the other posters: like modern cryptography, this issue shouldn't be about whether you can hide what you're doing so no malicious user can exploit that knowledge, simply because eventually someone will find a way into the system.
The system should be designed so that even when it is clearly visible what is being done, it's impossible/unfeasible to break into the system. Again -all modern hashing and encryption algorithms (=instructions) are fully public and viewable by all. The reason they're secure is that even when knowing all the information (bar the passphrase), it would take millions of machine hours to forcibly break the encryption.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
1. Yes, you SHOULD be that paranoid, unless you don't care if people steal elections.
2. There have been various schemes proposed to guarantee the integrity of the code - basically, a super-secure source control system to keep people from making unauthorized changes, and an independent auditing body that oversees development, tests for bugs, and supervises the installation of the software, then seals the boxes. The idea being to have multiple, redundant levels of oversight for EVERY step of the process, and to keep that oversight transparent to the public.
Doing it right will take a bit of work, but it's definitely possible. It'll never be 100% secure, but way more secure than just handing Diebold a check and trusting them to act professionally.
The key is not if the code is open source where anyone can submit modifications, the key is that the source code be open so anyone can verify any potential issues with the software. A second written record that is the official vote is also key. This way you can routinely recount a number of boxes to look for programming errors and actually conduct a 100% recount if required.
And exactly what will guarantee that the people who progam the machines used the "open" code, not a copy they hacked for a fee?
You would have to have several people bring in a copy they checked, or trust, then run a diff on all the copies (so that even if you paid off almost all the people, you would still get a difference somewhere). Then compile and upload it to the machines under group supervision.
The biggest problem here is not reducing the number of people that have to be compromised to an insignificant number (such as one or two).
Geeks being "'libertarian freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power', who would 'scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong'." is not a bug but a feature.
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea