Electronic voting?: How about OpenSource?

By zaxim at 12:21 am on February 5, 2008Comments Off on Electronic voting?: How about OpenSource?

A recent article posted on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/173241) talks about the possibility of software on electronic voting machines being open source. One claimed benefit is that open source will provide transparency and lessen the distrust that the public have for e-voting. But the article concludes that as of now there is no person or group working on it.

Main points

Lack of Voting Standard

The US is plagued with a massively different voting standards due to the freedom individual states have in implementing their preferred method.  This lack of standard provides a plethora of different types of voting machines, each with their own security flaws.  It also causes a problem for trying to develop open source code for these machines.

Paper versus Electronic

Many opponents of electronic voting fail to take into account how insecure paper ballots can be.  Ballot boxes can go missing, mechanical methods can fail, and other problems which even plague electronic voting such as corrupt poll workers.

But even electronic voting has it’s problems, especially the way some current generation machines store and tabulate their votes, many of which we talked about in class.

These problems lead many people to distrust e-voting machines.  There are fears that “a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”  It could be because you take two things which people don’t trust, politics and technology, and you get something people distrust twice as much.

Open Source Saves the Day

By making the software open source, you provide peer review, transparency, and if you’re a fan of open source, basically ultimate zen.

Well not quite…

The main thing is that none of the voting machine makers have revealed what their proprietary code looks like.  Another massive problem is there hasn’t been any funding for such a project, so there has not been any large group forming to develop code for these closed source machine.

But things might change in the future if federal and state election organizations standardize voting machines.  So who knows?

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