Jack Hitt talks about touch screen voting for This American Life [RealAudio].
He talks about how three closed-source companies provide the software, and that no one can inspect the source, like poll-watchers used to be able to inspect the levers and gears of the mechanical voting machines. Indeed, the Diebold software was so bad that it is trivially hacked, and instructions are floating around the Net. The story points out that Diebold horked elections in California and Maryland (hey Ziggy and Lisa!).
One solution he brings up is voting receipts so people have a record. I think that is a good idea, but not the solution
He did not bring up open-source software at all. He makes the case for inspecting the source of the voting software, and how companies are afraid to do that (security through obscurity). He keeps leading up to the case that poll-watchers should be able to inspect the source, but then stops short of saying that it should be open source.
So, who knows about open-source voting systems and would like to put together a friendly letter with me to Jack Hitt?
Every time the topic of electronic voting in the US comes up (or the farce of the 2000 Florida ballot), some wry englishman mentions, "Paper ballots still work perfectly fine for us. We get the results that night, we have accountability, and the damn things don't need to be rebooted."One solution he brings up is voting receipts so people have a record. I think that is a good idea, but not the solution.
Voting in the UK is a Farce!
chromatic on 2003-11-28T17:58:03
I mean, they don't vote for the Queen, do they?
Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce!
Dom2 on 2003-11-28T20:26:11
Ah, now you've picked up on the curious english tradition of the Royal Family. No, we don't vote for them, but that's because they don't matter.I think the closest thing to voting for Royals is paying for tabloids with the juiciest stories on them...
-Dom
Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce!
chromatic on 2003-11-29T00:12:37
You should probably watch more Monty Python, at least until my previous comment is mildly amusing.
:) Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce!
hfb on 2003-11-29T12:51:58
The British, especially the over 30 crowd, don't generally obsess over Monty Python the way yankees do...it's almost as tired as Elvis sightings.:) Re:Voting Systems
BooK on 2003-11-28T18:51:40
I'm not English, but I have big doubts about electronic voting. The bigger of them being accountability.
Open source software sure can help, but it's far more difficult to stuff ballots in every city of the country (in France, there are volonteers (scrutateurs) that check that everything is OK and do the counting after the poll has ended) than to quietly hack the central database.
On the other hand, I don't think we have more than 3 or 4 ballots a year, the big years. And we vote for one person or a list of people. Whereas when the Americans vote, I heard they vote on dozens of issues at the same time, I suppose that was the reason why ballot machine where introduced in the first place.
There is an open-source voting project named EVM. There was an announcement to the main Python list back in August and the project can be inspected here.
One of the core ideas in this project is that every machine should produce a paper receipt. I think this is very important because the debate on electronic voting often centers around "bugs" and "secure software" and many people who talk about this miss the core issue of risk management. Since there is no such thing as secure software, we have to ask ourselves what the consequences of failure are and how we can mitigate these. With electronic voting, the consequence is the very subversion of democracy. Given how drastic that is, I think a paper receipt is a small price to pay.
As a side note I should mention that I don't feel that electronic voting, open source or receipts are panaceas for our voting system problems. Nor do I feel that the voting booth is the only weak link in the voting chain. It would be nice, however, to admit at least one of the problems we have and fix it.
Sec 4.a.2.C SOFTWARE AND MODEMS-
(i) No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software. Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen.
(ii) No voting system shall contain any wireless communication device at all.
(iii) All software and hardware used in any electronic voting system shall be certified by laboratories accredited by the Commission as meeting the requirements of clauses (i) and (ii)
In particular, "Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen" (my emphasis).
Since the EFF made it very easy for me to contact my Representative regarding this issue, I did so a few weeks ago. Happily, I received his response today and found that he has decided to cosponsor the bill! The funny thing is that his office's letter to me was dated 11/22/2003, the day after his co-sponsorship was registered. I'd like to think that my small effort had some part in that. However, the bill is currently in committee and has not received a vote, so the more support there is in Congress, the better chance it will have of actually making it to the floor.
Of course, after that is has to make it past the Senate and (worse) Bush, so there's still a long fight ahead.
