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Sequoia Voting Systems Source Code Released
Mokurai sends a heads-up about Sequoia Voting Systems, which seems to have inadvertently released the SQL code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law: "Sequoia blew it on a public records response. ... They appear... to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold. They were wrong. The Linux 'strings' command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800-MB text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code." The code is all available for study or download, "the first time the innards of a US voting system can be downloaded and discussed publicly with no NDAs or court-ordered secrecy," notes Jim March of the Election Defense Alliance. Dig in and analyze.
To be honest shouldn't -any- code used to tally votes be released in the public domain for any US citizen?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I really can't see why we can't have a government-commissioned open-source system developed and mandated for use for public voting functions.
I absolutely hate the thought of my vote being inputted in to a closed magical-mystery box.
To make light of this does not do justice. This is potentially huge news.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Anyone with half a brain realized converting from dumb paper ballots to "smart" electronic machines that could manipulate the votes was a Bad Idea (tm). Unfortunately that disqualifies most of our state politicians.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As my Software Engineering instructor said...
Someone was thinking that voting was primarily a counting problem and had the idea that computers were excellent at counting, so computers would be excellent at registering votes.
Of course, voting is minimally about counting, and from what we've seen even these clowns couldn't do that right.
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've never seen the necessity to complicate things any further than paper, pencil, double physical count. Cheap, no machines involved, fast. On a national election down here (about 15 million voters), voting booths close at 6pm and results are known nation wide right on time to open the 8pm evening news.
You could have kept reading, you know.
The FEC standards say "prohibited". They do not say "Any self-modifying, dynamically loaded or interpreted code is only okay if someone who is a really good programmer says it is" or "Interpreted code is okey dokey as long as it isn't called all that often". If the database itself contains application code which modifies the database, then that's a problem. It doesn't matter what kind of code it is or how benign you think it is, it should not be there at all.
If you would like to share your educated opinion where it matters, feel free to comment in the wiki. That's what it's there for.
Except that so far, I'm seeing table construction and table layouts. I guess that's technically code - as any SQL technically is - but a good case can be made to say that it's just the database structure. Which can, of course, be subjected to a hash check.
Except that the DDL isn't in a bunch of scripts that are building the schema, the schema exists in a bunch of strings that are concatenated together in stored procedures with some arguments to the procs munged in, and passed to Exec statements when the stored procedures are run.
That's not normal table building, that's an unabashedly self-modifying database.
It doesnt matter if its changeable on the fly or not. The law is No interpreted code. Guess what they found? Interpreted code. Ergo, the law has been broken. How much more simply can this be put, that you would get it?