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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."
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
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
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.
If you are looking for the Open Voting Consortium website, it may be found at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
The basic idea that the OVC promotes is that of a computer-assisted voting station (or stations, to accomodate different kinds of voters who have physical impairments) that produces a paper ballot that *is* the official ballot and that can be read by both humans and computers.
This goes one step beyond verified voting. Verified voting has paper records that serve as audit trails but that are not themselves the official ballots. The OVC system goes one step further and makes the paper that the voter sees and approves the actual ballot.
There are a lot of complexities in voting systems; the OVC system avoids many of these difficulties because it is really a conservative application of computers to traditional methods.
In addition, the OVC system, because it produces a paper ballot, can have many different kinds of voting stations to accomodate the different physical needs of different voters.
The OVC wants voting software to be, at a minimum, open to inspection and testing by anyone.
Personally, I can conceive of some people who might come up with clever user interface mechanisms to help voters deal with ballots - and I personally don't think that those mechanism need to be part of the open voting systems. However, the core aspects of creating, handling, and counting ballots should not be wrapped in inpenetrable proprietary shrouds - every voter must know for a fact that his/her vote has been correctly recorded and correctly counted.
By-the-way - full disclosure time - I'm on the Board of Directors of the OVC.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.