CA Sec. of State Panel on Open Source Elections

goombah99 writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson is forming a panel to investigate using open source software in elections. Suggested Panel members include Security expert Bruce Perens and Python guru David Mertz who is associated with the sourceforge EVM2003 voting machine project. This is big since a favorable outcome could help fund prototypes of true open source election equipment and systems."

Comments

Yeah, right, like that will really happen

[Locke2005]

Just ask yourself the following: "Who has more money to pay lobbyists -- Diebold or the Open Source Movement?"

Re:Yeah, right, like that will really happen

[arbitraryaardvark]

Just ask yourself the following: "Who has more money to pay lobbyists -- Diebold or the Open Source Movement?"

Who has more lobbyists? Who has lobbyists who will work for free?

Now the tricky one is who has better lobbyists.

Very VERY good

[lilmouse]

This is very important in terms of keeping what's left of our democracy alive.

The number of abuses possible using Diebold's is simply staggering...

I'm impressed with a lot of the people campaigning against slimy voting machines - one is http://blackboxvoting.org/; there are people who have been devoting their lives to this since the last election... More then I'm good for!

Open Source voting machines will make it much easier for potential problems to be spotted, and a hell of a lot easier to get them fixed! The current companies don't really need to worry about fixing their problems - after all, what's wrong with fixing elections?

--LWM

NO NO NO NO NO

[crimethinker]

A hundred times, NO. I've beat this horse to death many times before, but it seems to be moving a bit, so here's another whack.

A receipt, whether a plain-text record or a number you can use over the phone or the internet, makes coercion so easy as to be laughable. What happens when your employer support some particular ballot measure, sees it fail at the ballot box, and then has an off-the-record policy where you show your receipt to the right people, and if it that says you voted for the measure, it will be in your favour the next time layoffs come around? What about a union shop that wants to make sure people voted, and voted for the "right" people? How about the police department wondering who supported the tax increase to pay for more police officers?

Sadly, because there are so many ways to abuse a verification mechanism, I have to conclude that a secret ballot must be kept absolutely secret, even from the voter himself once he drops it in the ballot box. And that's why I still favour pencil and paper, or punched cards. At least there's something tangible to go back and recount.

-paul

Re:NO NO NO NO NO

[wyldeone]

The correct way to implement this would be to not let people keep their reciepts. You would vote, it would add your vote to a databse, and then print out a verfication slip. You then look at it, and verify that it is correct, and then you drop it in a lock box, which is then kept for a recount.

Open-source not the most important thing

[Todd Knarr]

I think they need to concentrate not on a system that's open-source, but on a system where you don't need to trust the hardware to be able to verify the results. Open-source would be nice, but IMHO the critical requirement is more that you should be able to determine whether the reported results are correct without having to put unconditional trust in any one part of the system.

Eg., a system where the terminal records your vote electronically, then produces a printed ballot with both human-readable and barcode on it. The barcodes can be scanned quickly, so it's possible to compare the electronic results to the printed ballots. A template of the barcode for each possible value can be used to let humans quickly determine whether the barcodes match the human-readable name. And the voter can verify before putting his printed ballot in the box that the human-readable names on his ballot match the way he voted. Securing the physical ballots is similarly amenable to methods that insure that it'd take an improbable conspiracy to actually succeed in tampering with them.

Re:Oh goody.

[Homology]

The "American Dream" is the notion that anybody, if they work hard enough, will strike it rich.

The dream might have been true once, but not anymore. Today it's an illusion, a type of propaganda, to accept the status quo: That the very rich becomes ever more rich at the expense of the rest. Many have two jobs, but can't really makes end meets. They work hard, but they will never strike it rich. No Western country has such an uneven distribution of wealth and capital, and is so rich at the same time. But still the poor is left to fend for themselves as best as they can as recent events so tragically shows.