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

Not Rocket Science...

[jamieswith]

Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science

Of course not, however there is a lot of science involved in the process of mis-counting ballots... especially in a way that avoids the possibility of getting caught.

Those are valuable trade secrets worth protecting!

rocket science?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science. No, it's political science... and now computer science.

Voting_thing.tar

[gQuigs]

"[1] In case any techies want to see some code, here is the program for the voting counting program, written by Asheesh: http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ad/voting_thing.tar
Here is Jan's code (if you want to run it and have some trouble, let me know and I will help you with it) http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/test/straw.tar"

I love the name.

Re:Voting_thing.tar

[CastrTroy]

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

Re:Are paper ballots involved?

[jamieswith]

RTFA The user made their selection and a paper ballot printed out (with both a bar code, and a printed candidate name) - this was then placed in the balot box. When it became time to count, it was done in public, the candidate name was read, and then the ballot bar-code scanned, making the candidate tally increase on screen.

Re:Are paper ballots involved?

[0xABADC0DA]

They say with an election with many measures that instead of reading it aloud it could be put up on the projector and with enough observers any error would be spotted. But really all you need is one observer with a video camera of the running tally and the vote itself, then they can review it in slow motion later on.

I have described a system like this for a long time, only using OCR instead of bar codes. Bar codes are better though since the really important part is the running total that observers can match against the vote -- how the computer reads the printed vote is not important at all as long as the counts match what is human-readable. I'm glad they have created this system as it really shows how ridiculous the diebolds and others are.

Been using open source voting for years!

[jconley]

Everytime i vote in a slashdot poll!

Re:Been using open source voting for years!

[DaftShadow]

It's rigged. No one actually *chooses* the CowboyNeal option.

Re:Easy enough

[RobinH]

// What did I miss?

It's "ContainsKey", not "ContaintsKey". And you're missing a closing bracket, same line.

BTW, the PrintOnPaper() routine that's buried in the printer driver source code is:

void PrintOnPaper(string candidate)
{
      if(candidate.equals(CANDIDATE_I_HATE))
      {
            if(_ballots[CANDIDATE_I_HATE] >= _ballots[CANDIDATE_I_LIKE])
            {
                  _ballots[CANDIDATE_I_HATE]--;
                  _ballots[CANDIDATE_I_LIKE]++;
                  OutputToLogPrinter(CANDIDATE_I_LIKE);
            }
            else
            {
                  OutputToLogPrinter(candidate);
            }
      }
      else
      {
            OutputToLogPrinter(candidate);
      }
      OutputToVoterReceiptPrinter(candidate);
}

Hopefully there was a voter receipt printer and the voter could look at the receipt and verify that's who they voted for, then drop that into a box before leaving the polling station, then at least we could do a physical recount if someone contested the vote. Also, we should take 10% of the polling booths at random and do a manual count to check anyway.

Doesn't come close to HAVA standards

[Phoenix Rising]

If this is the totality of the OVC system, I hate to say it, but it's not going to make it in the real world for quite some time. By failing to meet accessibility requirements, it's an instant non-starter in a real election. I'm also concerned that any vote tabulation software is required; shouldn't that be standardized code based on the ballot?

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.

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