OSS Election Systems Desired, but Not Ready 182
An anonymous reader writes "Even though many American voters are ready for open source systems at the polls, Newsforge (a Slashdot sister site) has an interesting story about why open source may not be ready for the polls. From the article: 'The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin [an e-voting expert] noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). "I don't agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source," Rubin said. OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.'"
Should be part of more sweeping election reform. (Score:1, Interesting)
All voting machines should be open source and the systems should be utterly transparent. All machines should provide a paper receipt and ballot, to allow individuals to easily verify their selections and in the event that a manual recount is needed, for whatever reason.
Our elections are at the foundation of our democracy. If they are broken or flawed, our entire system of government is flawed. Reforming our elections to do everything humanly possible to make it so the system accurately reflects the will of the elecorate should be one of our nation's very highest priorities.
Always vote for the opposition (Score:1, Interesting)
That's actually a bad idea, as random voting affects both main parties equally and hence is really a vote for the establishment.
A far more effective approach is to always vote for the opposition. This makes life very tough for politicians during the 50% of the time when they are most dangerous, ie. when they are in government, because they will spend a lot of time on the defensive to try to avert the turnaround at the next election. Thus occupied, they will have less time to perform their usual damage.
Always voting for the opposition is in effect a vote against the two-party system, and sends the message that politicians are shit and their actions entirely without merit --- which of course is exactly right.
Re:Paper Ballots? (Score:2, Interesting)
but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...
I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can also create a private company and buy a significant percentage of shares in it and sell the system to other states or countries. There are all sorts of govt-private partnerships all over the world like this.
The disabled, the confused, and the stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
A computer UI can, in principle, be made easier to follow than a crowded piece of paper. Googling for "butterfly ballot" will get you an example that turned out to be important. A computerized ballot can do validity checking and spare the counting system from having to divine "voter intent" from a double-voted or unreadable ballot.
Those are the only real advantages I've ever seen mentioned.
India has a good system (Score:3, Interesting)
A simple, scalable, system.
I agree. (Score:4, Interesting)
These are a bit trickier than just building a machine that can add 1 to a column, but not THAT much harder.
I would ascribe every digital ballot paper with a hash value that uniquely identifies that paper and would be hard to forge. eg: Have each ballot paper marked with a serial number, then digitally signed by the electoral authorities.
Each voter's voting card would have a totally random public encryption key on it, plus a number. On going to the voting machine, the card would first tick the person off on the list of people who had voted. After casting the votes, the machine would encrypt the ballot paper with the encryption key, then it would append the number to the end. The electronic ballot paper would then, after a random delay, be sent back to the central repository via an SSL connection. The machine would keep no tallies and no records whatsoever. Nor would the local office. It would all be central. (The local office could count votes cast, though, as it would be useful to compare against votes decoded.)
The central system would use the number to select a relatively small set of private keys. It would try each key in turn until it found the key that unlocked that ballot paper. That private key would then be deleted. The unlocked ballot paper would be placed into a secure database. The number of valid votes identified would be counted and publicly published in real-time.
Just to be absolutely certain what is meant here, the database must be write-only from the central system and must be in a tamper-proof environment. Once all ballots are uploaded, it will then perform the count and download the results, ALL of the decrypted ballots and ALL of the encrypted ballots.
That way, anyone can perform a recount and although it would be a monumental task to validate the votes, it could be done. This system is pseudo-anonymous, not truly anonymous, using a VERY large base to make anonymity effective. The upshot is that if a random sample of voter cards were gathered (anonymously!), it would be possible to show that each of those cards matches to exactly one encrypted vote and one decrypted vote.
This shouldn't be necessary, as most of the avenues for fraud have already been eliminated. The effort to fraudulently enter a vote in this system would be extraordinary, as it would require breaking the ballot paper generation system, the encryption key system AND the decryption system, in order to be transparent. Failure to break all of these would result in the votes being rejected by the unbroken component.
I don't think an actual voting system need be this complex, but that's not the point. The point here is that it is possible to imagine a system that is (a) Open Source and (b) so damn-near impervious that it would be cheaper to just buy the person who'd been elected than rig so much as a single vote.
Has this been done? Probably not. Could it be done? Sure. Give me a couple of weeks, a few smart-cards, readers, kiosks and a tamper-proof computer case. There should be no difficulty in writing a system that would be close to iron-clad for the next 50-100 years, with so close to zero chance of tampering that it's just not going to happen.
If an OSS election system group has the hardware and would like to play with this scheme, I'd be happy to write it for them.
Inspection is not enough. (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
Not only does maintaining "intellectual property [gnu.org] rights" not preclude others from distributing copies of the software for a fee (as anyone who understands Free Software licensing already knows), merely inspecting the software is insufficient to get real work done in a way that is beneficial to the public.
I served on the Champaign County election equipment advisory board—an appointed board made up of representatives of businesses and political parties from Champaign County, Illinois. Over months in the past couple of years this board weighed a few machines from a variety of vendors so that we could make a recommendation to the elected County Board who would then make the final decision and sign the appropriate contracts. We were told at the first meeting that we were only to consider machines from "approved vendors" but in the end we learned that even the machines we were considering had not yet all been approved by the State of Illinois. It was just a means of narrowing the allowable debate, effectively excluding a variety of vendors who probably never knew we were seriously considering voting machines.
I knew early on (and did my darndest to convince my fellow board members) that we want complete source code to the machines we'd buy so that we could make repairs and improvements while enjoying the benefits of global competition. Locally we have lots of talented computer programmers, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is in this county. It is a shame to waste all the talent we have by getting into a monopoly.
Politically, there are good reasons to need the source code too: it's your machine paid for with your tax dollars, so you should not be restricted from getting it fixed when it breaks, running it any time you want, and not just inspecting what it ostensibly does. But we should also not constrain ourselves to the features the machine has today. Locally, we could switch from a first-past-the-post to some kind of ranked voting system (like instant run-off or some Condorcet system) for local elections. But so long as we can't get the vendor to do what we want and as long as we can't help ourselves because we're choosing to buy into a monopoly for support (which is what you do when you get proprietary software), we have an additional restriction to overcome with our voting machines—we can't switch to the voting system we want because the proprietor won't let us and we can't afford to simply switch to another set of machines.
I discussed Free Software voting machines on Counterpunch [counterpunch.org].
How Belgium does it. (Score:2, Interesting)
The major part of the votes since more then five years have been entered electronically.
The majority of the systems are made by Steria (formally, Integris, a part of Bull) http://www.steria.be/ [steria.be]
The system consits of PC running some old M$ DOS version (4.5 I think) with a pen-screen and a magnetic card reader.
Secrecy of vote + audit trail: each voter gets one anonymous card. The card is writtten using the voting computer (in a ballot box) and is then dropped into a drop-box vault. You see the parallells with paper-and-pencil voting I suppose...
Counting happens afterwards and recounting remains possible (untill the cards are wiped for the next elections)
Open-Source: Even though the software is written by a commercial company (Steria) the software is open for scrunity (by any citizen) at the Interior Ministry. Before last elections, Steria's source was examined by a professor and he detected one weak point (regarding the use of a random generator using the PC's BIOS) but it requires physical access to the voting card (in the vault) and it only couldcompromises secrecy of the vote (if you manage to track the order in which cards have been written).
There is also a competitor with some (similar) voting computers, but they represent a minority and that same professor called their coding "very bad spaghetti code that is impossible to understand"...
One big difference with the rest of the world: like I said, every adult citizen has to vote, meaning that the number of vote(r)s is perfectly known. Also, since it is a nation wide occurence there is only one voting day. The benefit of this is that the effort of actually organising the vote, including the counting (there are still votes on paper!) can be perfectly predicted.
There are some communues that (in last elections) still voted on paper.
In those communues the time allowed to vote is much shorter (only untill noon often), and still the results of those communes are the last to come in: electronic voting really does have major benefits here: longer opening hours of the polling stations and faster results.
I Disagree (Score:2, Interesting)