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Sequoia To Publish Source Code For Voting Machines
cecille writes "Voting machine maker Sequoia announced on Tuesday that they plan to release the source code for their new optical-scan voting machine. The source code will be released in November for public review. The company claims the announcement is unrelated to the recent release of the source code for a prototype voting machine by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. According to a VP quoted in the press release, 'Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security.'"
My thought exactly. In fact, there's no way to trust vendor-supplied hardware on this account, or any hardware of reasonable complexity at all.
I still think there's only one sensible way to do voting:
1. Let the voter fill in an optical scan form.
2. Let lots of different interested parties scan the form.
3. Verify that all parties have the same count after every form.
4. Lock the forms away in case a recount is needed.
If there's only one party doing the counting, they can never be trusted.
Only by having every competing interest do the counting (with constant cross-checking) can a system be potentially trusted.
Even then, you have to have enough parties involved to avoid the possibility of collusion.
Combine this with a system like Punchscan.org to add privacy, and maybe you've got something.
That makes about as much sense as anything I could think of. I thought they might be going with Linux on the optical scanners might be a cost-saving measure, and I figured that since they mostly seem to be a Microsoft shop, they might have more C# experience in-house than say, Java.
Their use of embedded Linux makes me wonder if their earlier refusals to release their code was legal. Not their C# stuff, or their DB schema or sql code, but if they took off-the-shelf Linux and resold it, aren't they at least required to make that source available along with any changes, if any, they made?
IANAL or GPL expert, just kind of wondering.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.