What Does This Have To Do With Open Source?

Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of state, advocates that open-source software be used in voting machines. What can I say? The fact that some voting machine companies insist on keeping their software source code secret has to be a cause for concern. She maintains that the purchase of voting machines is often left up to people, who are not competent to judge whether it is secure or not. But worse than that, the purchase contracts often insist that the code is not reviewed and no access to it is provided. Sound’s like there’s a need for a set of voting machine standards and a national testing center to me.

Imho there is nothing wrong with the buyer having access to the code, but giving experts access to the code makes far more sense, and it might even be possible to devise tests that prove that legitimate code is running as part of a sane set of procedures to test machines on voting day, a few moments before the public starts to use them.

Incidentally, it doesn’t have to be Open Source issued under the GPL. You could have proprietary systems opening their source. It’s about being able to audit the code, not about who owns the rights to the code. But actually, this is a side issue that has more to do with quality assurance. Open Source will not stop machines from being compromised.

Cleverer Options
There are cleverer ideas than this which could make voting bullet-proof secure. Some of them have been discussed or proposed by academics, but sadly, none of them is currently being used. Here’s the gist of an idea that is pretty bullet proof:
The idea is simple. You have two systems. One is the voting machine itself and the other is a system which checks whether the voting machines are working accurately. The system that checks runs remotely (over the Internet).
When the voter votes the voting machine prints a log of the vote AND issues a receipt to the voter which encrypts the votes of the voter along with the identity of the voting machine. The voter can use the receipt to check their vote on-line. If there is any discrepancy between vote cast and what the on-line system says, the voter can complain. If a voting machine gets compromised at any point in any way the checking system catches the error and the paper trail can be used for a recount.
With the right encryption, this kind of system would work and be very difficult to compromise. But you wont see any such system in operation in the US in November.

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