Bernhard Seefeld's Blog

eVoting must be Open Source

Recently, activity is increasing in strengthening the role of open source in our government.

One thing, that in my opinion absolutely must be open source for auditing purposes is voting software. Not only vote-over-the-web software but also computer based voting in poll booths. See Phil Windley's essay. Here in Switzerland even that is (AFAIK) quite far away, but it seems like other countries are much further there. And they don't follow that rule and already they seem to have huge problems.

E.g. Diebold sold the state of Ohio their voting software at the same time their CEO promises to be "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". Talk about conflict of interests! And not just that, their contract explicitly forbids the state to even touch the machines, let alone examine the machines to verify wether they work correctly. Hello?

Almost predictably, the New Zealand Herald sports a report, where many tight races in key states were unexpectedly won by Republicans, even though pre-polling, exit polling and historic patterns would predict otherwise. In just too many cases to raise doubt. And, conveniently, no way to verify (the machines have printers to produce a written record, but they were not activated).

Then, internal memos leak with thousands of emails describing grave problems operators of the machines have. People publishing them for the public conscience are immediately sued under DMCA violations. Luckily I live outside their jurisdiction, so here you have the zip file. Scoop has more commentary on it, including the most interesting quotes.

Can anyone tell me why this story didn't spread further? Does it fit too much the current meme (Republicans, liars, etc.) to be interesting? I mean, this stuff is at the heart of democracy, and the whole world laughed at US voting procedures three years ago already!? Or is it too risky to suspect the GOP of election fraud, and in the end just this political risk saves them from a proper investigation? (I mean, with all the distrust on the honesty of their goals I already have, I still find myself having a problem believing that they are that corrupt)

In any case, voting procedures have to adhere the highest standards in transparency and this is what has been done in paper-voting for decades and even centuries now. The way to do this in electronic voting is complete open source software and sound principles like logging to reliable write-only media (e.g. paper).