Help Black Box Voting Examine ES&S Software

Gottesser writes, "Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has asked for the help of the Slashdot community. She would like people to take a look at ES&S's central tabulator software and start reporting on their impressions of it. This is a past release of the software but it is similar to the applications in production. Sorry, no source code." Read on for Bev's request and pointers to the code repositories. Update 23:38 GMT by SM Bev has confirmed that blackbox1.org is indeed owned by BlackBoxVoting making both a comment in the discussion and a post on the front page of blackboxvoting.org to help assuage reader fear/doubt.

From Bev:

"ES&S 'Unity' central tabulator software.

Software stash: three zip files --
http://www.blackbox1.org/ems.zip
http://www.blackbox1.org/un5.zip
http://www.blackbox1.org/Unity.zip

User Manuals for ES&S software can be found here:
http://www.bbvforum s.org/forums/messages/2197/2864.html

This is the ES&S central tabulator software, the ES&S counterpart to the Diebold GEMS central tabulator software. No source code, sorry, and no software for the precinct machines. This is reportedly one generation back, but from what I'm told has significant similarities to the new stuff. I would appreciate it if you can provide me with feedback on your impressions after looking at it. You may want to Slashdot it or whatever.

Best,

Bev Harris
Founder
Black Box Voting

Comments

Don't bother

[jrivar59]

I would argue that examining this software is counter productive, and not a good use of resources.

The fact that it is closed and "secret" is offensive enough on its own to protest for change. If democratic election is not the most obvious case for open source (and open hardware), then nothing is.

Re:Don't bother

[daveschroeder]

Why aren't we simply fighting for a permanent voter-verified paper trail, instead of always saddling every e-voting initiative with demands that EVERYTHING, hardware and software, be open source?

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's not a good idea.

What I'm saying is this: since, even if recounts must be requested every time, a permanent voter-verified paper trail (and a true comprehensive system with regular audits and comparisons between paper vote counts and tabulations) solves almost everything, why are we instead trying to essentially unseat established, commercial enterprise e-voting vendors?

Wouldn't a more productive approach be to simply get a paper trail into place, since even an open source system is almost as worthless without one?

Keep in mind, too, that an open source system still needs to go through complex certification processes and code freezing just like the commercial products do. Even though the commercial products aren't "open source", the certification process allows for the necessary level of inspections by election agencies and external entities. The problem was the certification procedures being routinely ignored or bypassed for convenience, something that can just as easily happen with an "open source" solution.

The problem is that doing an electronic, anonymous, secret ballot that also exists in a system that attempts to enforce one-vote-per-person, combined with all the complexities and vagaries of local municipal and county systems is a lot harder than doing a vertically integrated system for one corporate customer (such as a bank).

Keep in mind, too, that much of the legislation (such as the Help America Vote Act) that essentially mandated e-voting in the hopes of ensuring uniform access to modern voting equipment was done in response to complaints about unfairness and inconsistency with manual systems in the 2000 elections, and not just in Florida. The one critical error was not explicitly recognizing that an electronic secret ballot is a hard thing to do, even without corruption, fraud, and incompetence, and a paper trail wasn't specifically mandated. And no, that wasn't by design. It was an error of omission.

Now, states, counties and municipalities have had to shell out hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, more dollars to add and retrofit certified paper trail functionality to existing systems (which, indeed, many are doing). But all e-voting vendors offer it. It just costs a lot of money.

So instead of trying to push out enterprise vendors with multi-million dollar contracts (which is essentially what demanding "all open source" would do, since no commercial vendor is going to open up ALL of their software and hardware code and designs), why not just work to get a permanent voter-verified paper trail in place in as many places as possible as soon as possible, perhaps even mandating it via legislation, since that will be required no matter what system is implemented?

What's more important: the egos of the people who have a vendetta against Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S, or actually getting a mechanism into place as quickly as possible that guarantees votes will be accurately cast and counted (and at a minimum immediately shows if there is a problem? (And yes, I DO expect the burden of actually looking at the piece of paper to verify that it's correct to fall on the person who is voting.)

Re:Don't bother

[Chris Burke]

From my first post, emphasis added: The problem with the current crop of voting machines is that they do not produce a paper ballot that is the actual counted ballot.

I'm not talking about a paper summary, I'm talking about a paper ballot.

That's the point. You can do whatever the hell you want inside the machine, perform whatever trickery you want, but if it prints a ballot with the choices I made on it, then that is all that matters and your trickery was for naught.

Anticipating the next question of "why electronic voting at all then?", the answer is the same reason we moved to it in the first place: preventing poorly formatted ballots from causing invalid votes, and for accessibility reasons.

Re:Hi, I'm Bev Harris. There's nothing fishy here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully you are Bev Harris, but you see that there's no way for us to know. I could create a Slashdot account claiming to be Elvis, and nobody could verify whether the King had truly returned.

It would help significantly if there were a post either on the home page of blackboxvoting.org, or in the bbvforums.org forums under your name. This way there would be some credible record that this information did truly come from Bev Harris.