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OSS Election Systems Desired, but Not Ready
An anonymous reader writes "Even though many American voters are ready for open source systems at the polls, Newsforge (a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting story about why open source may not be ready for the polls. From the article: 'The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin [an e-voting expert] noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). "I don't agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source," Rubin said. OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"
What's wrong with paper ballots? They work great in Canada. We even have election results within a few hours, at most. As far as I can tell the only "downside" is that paper ballots are hard to rig elections with.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Here in Australia we have a system that works, and has been used already.
http://www.softimp.com.au/index.php?id=evoting
Common sense is not so common
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
Perhaps the author meant to say:
"no American vendor offers open source software and systems that are ready for voting."
Can anyone explain me how can I trust OSS running box more than the one running closed software? How can I verify that the software running in the box is the same I verified? How can I be sure the cpu isn't mangled by some foreign goverment? (Since most hw is now made on taiwan..) What's wrong with paper ballots?
I haven't really read how this e-voting works, but if it means you can log on to a website and vote from home, wouldn't that make your vote not anonymus? What would happen with the log of your IP, your vote could be traced back to you.
I like paper ballots because they don't get traced back to you, once you put it in the box you have no identity.
I would have thought that the fundamental problem with closed source, in this particular application (not in general), is the fact that it is closed source. For elections to work it is important that the entire process be open to scrutiny. If something goes wrong, you need to be able to look through and find what/where... even if the only remedy is to say "bug x in function y of the source code makes this result invalid, we need to vote again using a different system (eg. paper)". But if the source is not available for scrutiny, you can't do this... you can look at the results and say "that's a bit odd", but you can't trace back to probable cause. This is precisely what closed source software can never get right, whereas OSS does by definition
1. Open source. We need to be able to trust these systems and how can we do that without being able to examine the code behind them?
Indeed, I concur
2. Paper records kept for the government. Just in case there is a trust issue, this is a backup method for the recount.
So long as these records contain a human readable indication of an individual voter's intent, and were verified by the voter at vote-time.
3. Paper records for the voter. Worst case, every voter has a copy of their own vote. Hard to use for a recount, but could help identify irregularities.
Absolutely, uncategorically, under no circumstances. Proof of vote makes wholesale coercion, vote-buying and vote-selling methods practical.
However, if voting fraud is an issue, it will not be a small margin. It is doubtful that someone will try to fraud for only a couple of votes
Then clearly, you underestimate the skills and resources of your adversary. It is precisely small margins that are concerning. Remember, a small margin of votes can be changed in a close race without producing statistically significant differences from polling (and exit-polling) to raise suspicion. Such small changes, well placed, can have a significant effect on the overall race.
If you think that people do not have the skill to predict where small vote count frauds will make a difference, you need to visit the "gerrymandering" page on wikipedia, particularly the "Gerrymandering computer technology" heading.
The (software|hardware) is only as smart as the person operating it.
The same could be said for democracy...
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
Look. This is America. The nation that led the world in technological development for two hundred years, put men on the Moon a couple of times and invented the personal computer, and now we're saying that we can't even develop a machine that can count reliably???!!! Please. This is not, repeat not a technological issue. It is a political one, pure and simple.
The only reason that implementing a transparent, auditable electronic voting system is such a problem is because there are certain people that have a vested interest in making it a problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Is closed source ready for the polls?
A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.
There's such a thing as braille. Blind people can actually read you know. They can even post on Slashdot with the right software.
May the Maths Be with you!