Open Source Voting Software Success

elhaf writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they had the software prepared and Saturday's event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science."

Comments

Re:Is it even worth protecting?

[jamieswith]

It's truely a sign of how in-bred people are, if they are genuinely fearful of genetic diversity in the population.

Genetic diversity is what leads to a strong, resilient and intelligent population.

You elected someone because he looked just like your cousin cleetus, but "knowed how to talk a bit more smart" the last two times... and look where we are now... when will you learn?

Re:Are paper ballots involved?

[DragonWriter]

Anything electronic can be pwned.

Any process can be subverted; paper-ballot elections were stolen through a large number of different means long before computers were invented.

This isn't to say that paper ballots can't be abused. Even so, we have a long history of dealing with election fraud where paper ballots are involved. We know what it looks like and it tends to be obvious.

Its pretty obvious when electronic ballots are used, too -- pretty much the same way that paper-ballot fraud is (pre-election polling being dead on except in precincts where machines from a certain manufacturer were used, counts for certain candidates in precincts above the total number of registered voters, etc.)

The media (and, following their lead, most of the public) may ignore these clear signs, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

All of this is not to say that paper ballots aren't important: they are, because without them you've got nothing to reconcile a fishy-looking election too. And because of the long-history of paper-ballot fraud, we've gotten pretty good and protecting against the kinds of things that would mess up the paper trail, if there is a recount. We can't do that as reliably without paper. But we shouldn't pretend that paper-ballot based elections are somehow more pure, or have more obvious first signs of fraud. Short of going back and doing a recount, the signs of fraud are pretty much the same for paper ballots as they are for electronic ones.

How can you be sure

[Dwedit]

How can you be sure that the program you are running really is the program that you think it is, and not a modified copy?

Re:How can you be sure

[CastrTroy]

Sorry, I forgot that printers always printed out things perfectly, without any problems. Also you can make a ballot laid out or badly worded on a computer screen, just as well as you can on a piece of paper. If you have so much stuff on the ballot that you can't put it all on a single piece of paper, then get bigger paper, or use more than 1 sheet. Also, why even elect officials if there is so much stuff on the ballot. Might as well just forgo paying them, and get the public to vote on every single issue. This is why you elect representatives. To represent you. So you don't have to vote on every piddly little thing.

Re:Voting_thing.tar

[CastrTroy]

How do you verify the machine you are voting on is actually running this code?