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NY Legislature Rejects "Microsoft Amendment"
An anonymous reader writes "Finally, some good news on electronic voting. The New York state legislature rejected an amendment proposed by Microsoft's lobbyists which would have gutted New York's requirements for voting machine vendors to turn over their source code to the state Board of Elections. Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton commented: 'The voting machine vendors have known for two years what our laws said. Now they're saying that those parts of their systems using Microsoft software have to be proprietary? It's just wrong.'"
The solution is to create a system where you don't have to trust the source code to begin with
Touchscreen, vote, hit done, the machine prints a paper ballot. You review said ballot and deposit the paper ballot in the ballot box.
What could be simpler and less prone to manipulation or error?
In that scenario, you don't have to know jack shit about the voting machine or its source code. It doesn't matter. The voter reviews the output, not the internals. If people start noticing that a certain machine or certain brand of machines prints incorrect ballots frequently, well then steps can be taken to figure out why.
But the end to end system can't be gamed.
There is no level of code review or "trusted computing platform" specification that will provide anywhere NEAR that level of trust and confidence in the system. Add to that the fact that you have an incontrovertible source of paper ballots for recounts, what more does anyone want? why do we put up with anything less?
I click on them all the time.
It's a deliciously satisfying way of transferring cold hard cash from Microsoft's wallet to Slashdot and Google.
I'm no fan of MS in any way, shape or form, but I can completely understand their reluctance to hand over their source code. In this day and age there is a good chance that it would be leaked faster than you can say BitTorrent.
If the price of admission into the eVoting game is handing over their source code then they made a wise business decision. It's far too small of a market for MS to chance exposing Windows source (and all the security breaches that would soon follow). In the big picture of things, MS made the right decision. That aside, they still suck for trying to sneak that amendment in.
Of course, you by yourself won't have much impact but there would be if 1% of Slashdot's reader base did.
Camping on quad since 1996.
In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.
IANAProgrammer, But for this application neither is acceptable.
Given what the code is required to do (allow for the selection of a vote in each catagory, record said votes, provide totals for each catagory) shouldn't the code be blindingly simple? Give me ANSI graphics and no mouse driver. Give me three imputs: cursor up, cursor down, enter/select. Hell, it can print out on a dot matrix. It should be a requirement that the code be small enough to be reviewed completely, without excessive effort.
We are all just people.