Australian Voting Software Goes Closed Source 567
From Diebold's last-minute installation of uncertified software updates on its touch-screen election machines in California (leading to decertification of the company's machines in several California counties) to ethically troublesome relationships between politicians and the companies whose machines count the votes that determine their employment, the possible benefits of electronic voting seem swamped at the moment by objections (from simply prudent to caustically cynical) to its security and integrity.
Within the world of electronic voting, though, eVACS (for "Electronic Voting and Counting System") has been a rare success story both for open source development methodology and for the benefits that electronic voting can offer. The first generation of eVACS (running on Debian Linux machines) was developed starting in March 2001 in response to a request for bids by the Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission (ACTEC), and it was done on a budget of only AUS$200,000.
(The Australian Capitol Territory includes Australia's capitol city, Canberra, as well as surrounding suburbs and Namadgi National Park.)
Besides a respectable list of features driven by ACTEC's initial requirements (like support for 12 voting languages, and audio support for blind voters), eVACS has an advantage not enjoyed by many electronic voting systems: it's been successfully, uneventfully used to gather votes in a national election. The election in which it played a part went smoothly, and the eVACS system itself functioned as hoped.
This year, though, ACTEC asked Software Improvement to update the code for future elections, and Software Improvement decided to go them one better -- or, in the eyes of open source enthusiasts, one worse. The notes Ritchie was provided to deliver announced a change to the process under which the code is released; specifically, a switch from an open source license to something the company calls "controlled open source."
According to Software Improvement, simply releasing election-machine code under a liberal license such as the GPL is undesirable for two reasons: it means a loss of the company's intellectual property, and unfettered access could lead to a compromise of the voting system, if a determined cracker could find and exploit flaws in the code. (Software Improvement has not supplied any examples to show that this has happened, however.)
The company's use of "open source" would find little support from organizations like the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative. Software Improvement's idea of software openness is rather limited. Claiming that open source development is insufficient, even inimical to creating trust in election systems, the company now says that portions of eVACS's codebase will be released only to approved analysts, and in encrypted form, to enable viewing only for auditing purposes, rather than code contribution. Repeated viewings would be reported to the company, and only a limited number of views would be permitted before the code would self-destruct.
After delivering the prepared presentation, Ritchie took a few minutes to react to the changes it announced.
"Six hours ago, while I was reading through this on the plane," said Ritchie, "I was infuriated to read what it actually says."
Ritchie, though, is a computer-literate political science student at the University of California - Davis, and behind the Open Vote Foundation. He said he's decided to resume the project represented on that site, started with the intent to fork and bring to the U.S. the first generation, GPL'd version of eVACS.
"A long time ago, I read the first news report about Diebold, wondered why we didn't have open source election software for our voting machines. Eventually, I found out that Australia had apparently beaten us to it. It seemed like a good thing; the eVACS system was developed and released as GPL code, it was checked and rechecked by computer science people and all kinds of election officials. I said, 'Why don't we bring this to the U.S.? It's GPL, let's do it.'"
So he started the nonprofit Open Vote Foundation to bring the software to the U.S., specifically to California. Ritchie went to the meeting at the California Attorney General's office which resulted in decertification of Diebold machines in that state's 2004 election process, and his involvement in the fight against Diebold's secret-source voting machines is what led him to the open source eVACS; now he finds that the restrictions on the formerly GPL software are "even worse that that on MS's shared source. To call that open source is a bit dishonest."
"As of 6 hours ago," he said, "I've decided to start that again. It's not that hard; I mean how hard is it to say 'add one to this vote'? ... I remembered my old plan, and thought 'Let's take the old Australian code, fork it, and work from that -- and that is still an option. This is the great thing about open source software. If the old lead developer goes insane, you can always fork it, right?"
Know thy vote counter (Score:5, Interesting)
What amuses me. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a little shocked, however, that more professed conservatives haven't spoken out against the new systems. To hear some of them tell it, the Democratic Party practically invented vote fraud, so you'd expect that they'd be much more suspicious of unverifiable, untrackable voting systems. But none of them seem to have anything to say on the matter - or have I not been looking in the right place?
Diebold conspiracy theories (Score:5, Interesting)
But then I had the opportunity to speak with some senior managers from the company, who told me that, in fact, virtually the entire company was united behind dropping the electronic voting machines. They didn't trust the codebase (which was developed by a company Diebold acquired), felt the issue needed to be more deeply researched than it had been, and believed the bad publicity was hurting Diebold's reputation for security and reliability in its cash-management business.
But CEO Walden O'Dell disagrees. Virtually single-handedly, he has kept the e-voting project alive despite the vocal opposition of virtually everyone involved with it. When I asked the managers why they thought O'Dell was so strongly behind the project, their answers were blunt: "Politics."
If that's how management inside Diebold thinks, perhaps there's something to the conspiracy types after all....
- Watchful Babbler
Why not an AVM? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not the voter's problem.
and unfettered access could lead to a compromise of the voting system, if a determined cracker could find and exploit flaws in the code.
Or it could lead to anyone in the community blowing the whistle on propriatary back doors or the poor coding practices of the developers or....
These arguments are completely backwards.
how hard is it to say 'add one to this vote'?
Why not model these voting machines after ATM's? Every registered voter starts out with a single vote per election. Accounts are credited and debited and everyone is accountable... Automatic Voting Machine anyone?
Insane... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. However, getting the politician's buy-in on certifying the fork will be problematic:
On the one hand, we have academia and open source developers pushing their idea. (Politicians aren't real comfortable around smart people or people with multiple piercings)
On the other hand, we have a group of respectible business men pushing their idea. (Politicians can relate to business men because they wear the same suits and ties, and many of them were business men themselves at one point or another)
Who is going to win? Hmmmm....
Re:Why not an AVM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds good to me- ATMs keep paper records in the background (even when you choose not to get a receipt, listen closely and you'll here the "bllaurp" of a dot matix printer going off for a line for every transaction). To preserve vote privacy, your "account" to be debited or credited would only record that you did vote in such and such election- not how you voted, which would be recorded separately. And to top it off, you could get your printed reciept BEFORE you saved the record- just to be sure.
Re:More eyes will catch bad/illegal code (Score:5, Interesting)
In the olden days, people would sell their vote for money. It wasn't until I believe the 1850's or 1860's that we had an anonymous voting system. In an odd coincidence, we imported the Austrialian method back then too!
Before the 1860's you wrote in the name of the candidate you wished to vote for. In small enough precinects, you could literally know everyones handwritting. Before that, you actually walked into the town capital building, and announced your vote in a loud clear voice the the people in charge of keeping track.
Each candidate would have a witness there keeping track of who voted which way, and could then pay off the people who they bought a vote from.
As the other response said, I'd imagine that the first whites to vote for a black in Georgia probably didn't make it too far out of the voting booth before getting harrassed. Unless there was an anonymous system.
Kirby
Re:"how hard is it to say 'add one to this vote" (Score:4, Interesting)
The counting of the votes is easy, and a well-solved problem. The vast majority of the work goes toward making sure those votes are counted with perfect accuracy (i.e. that the simple interface never "glitches" about sending the correct vote to the counter), and in securing the device against tampering with the vote count or interface before, during, and after the election.
It is exactly because of the potential problems that a printed, hand-countable, voter-verifiable paper audit trail should be an essential part of any e-voting rules.
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Uh... GPL? (Score:2, Interesting)
Under the GPL, the original writers stil hold their copyrights. By modifying the code, they submit to the terms of the GPL, but what they write is still theirs. And if the original writer wants to do away with the GPL on a GPL-licensed work, he can contact the other authors, and since they each all hold unencumbered copyrights to their own works, a closed version may be made.
Even if they cannot get permission from all those who wrote the code, if they remove the code written by those who dissent, they can still close the work.
The GPL is a very solid license. It is also quite readable. You can read it at http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html [fsf.org].
i don't understand this election software stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
i don't understand how it could be this expensive, exchange rates be damned, whatever
i don't see why this voting software needs to be so complicated? wouldn't some linux/*bsd/windows/mac/beos/atari/xbox/gamecube/d
the romans and greeks used rocks or sticks or whatever the fuck they could find on the ground, and voting worked. 1500 years later and it has to be so complex?
where did these software engineers go to school? have they never heard of occam?
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone created stickers that said something simple such as "How do you know this machine recorded your vote correctly", or something of that sort, then distributed those to people who would go into the voting booths and affix these stickers to the machines or voting booth walls or what not.
Would that get a stir out of people? How would John Doe going into the booth and seeing this colorful sticker asking the simple question react?
Granted, this would be a 'too late' type of situation, and I urge people to speak out ahead of time (I've already wrote my election officials, have you?). But what sort of reaction would this have at the booths...suddenly people questioning the machines, at the time of voting?
Just a question that I felt like tossing out:)
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, NO.
A) We don't live in a democracy.
B) All the options on the ballot are unacceptable.
Why should I vote again?
MUST be out of the country for absentee: NOT SO! (Score:3, Interesting)
Donno where you live, but in Virginia, for instance, that is SO NOT true. There is a whole list of reasons that are OK, from being away at school to being out of town on business to just having a long workday.
For Virginia's rules, visit: http://www.sbe.state.va.us/Election/AbsenteeVoting /absente1.htm [state.va.us]
Many states have similar rules; a quick trip to you state's web site will get you the scoop...
Manual punch cards are the least worst (Score:3, Interesting)
You manually put holes in a card, and drop it into a locked ballot box. Someone has to do a lot of dirty work to make that box disappear, or alter the cards. Plus there are no ink marks that can be erased or smeared or whatever. (Don't forget to remove any hanging chads, lest an evil soul tries to glue it back in place)
Also, paper does not have source code.
Re:you MUST be out of the country for absentee (Score:3, Interesting)
Politicians might claim [rpi.edu] that this is illegal, but the courts have said otherwise. In New York, for example, you only need to be living there 30 days before an election to vote (as long as you don't vote anywhere else).
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:4, Interesting)
What? How does it work in the US now? Here over in Europe you normally randomly pick Joe Schmo's for that job, normally in group of 5-10. Statistically there is almost always one that will blow the whistle.
Re:i don't understand this election software stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, the Amendments do. But originally Senators existed to represent the states (as states), not the individual citizens (as individuals). The change was a horrible loss because it was a huge step in the destruction of state's rights. Now the Feds control all kinds of stuff that states used to, and it is largely because -- from a legislative/representative standpoint -- we allowed them to remove the middle-man. It was assumed by the founders that each state's 'selfish' interests would be one of the checks in the system, and one of the important separations between the Feds and the citizenry. By making the state representatives beholden to the people, not the state government, we basically did away with the Senate and enlarged the House.
"At least half the U.S. states provide for citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives."
Yeah, and they shouldn't do that either. This is another 'helpful tweak' in the direction of pure democracy. Any tweak in that direction does one main thing: it strengthens the majority, and weakens the minority. Those are variables, of course: who knows when you will be part of one or the other. But it removes the structure that protects us all from a tyranny of the majority.
"Was Alexis de Tocqueville delusional when he penned Democracy in America?"
Nope. Of course he was using this term in the general sense - a democracy can mean any form of government where the people are the fundamental source of political power. However when most people protest "We are not a Democracy" it is because the discussion has come to turn on the specifics of government. And while we are democratic, we are not a Democracy in the strictest sense. Any careful discussion of these things has to be specific about terms, and in a disciplined pol-sci discussion we are definitely a constitutional republic. Tocqueville was making a slippery-slope argument, and apparently he was correct. He saw too much of a pure democracy to remain true to the goal of 'freedom and justice for all', and predicted it would turn into 'freedom and justice for some'.
Opportunity to bring the issue into the public ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike most countries, voting is actually compulsory in Australia. If you don't vote in a federal or state election, and you don't have a good reason, you get fined. If you refuse to pay your fine, then you have to answer to a court. If you keep on refusing to accept some form of penalty, then eventually you get sent to jail.
If even a small number of people were to refuse to vote in an election, on the basis that they thought the election process was not transparent, and then subsequently wound up in jail, this would be bound to generate media interest. It would get the issue out in the open where the public could hear the issues involved and think about it. Who knows, maybe it could even attract international attention ?
How About the Indian eVote system? (Score:1, Interesting)
I hope I'm not the only one here (fat chance) who read the recent story on the Indian eVoting machines -- they had simple hardware (voting boxes that ran off of 9V batteries), a simple vote tallying box, the ability to support India's diverse population (low literacy, more 100 official languages, more than a billion people).
A poll basicly runs off of a 8 bit microcontroller, with the program burned into
ROM. It seems largely immune to everything other than out-and-out mass manufacture of counterfiet hardware, or showing up at the polls with firearms.
This url isn't the original URL that I remembered, but it's got similar background info: http://www.jivha.com/blog/archives/2004/04/27/how
Re:When is civil disobedience justified? (Score:2, Interesting)
You might find this [amazon.com] book interesting ("I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode Or Not" by Shenkman and Harding). It debunks a number of myths in American history, among them the one about how the Boston Tea Party was some patriotic act of defiance.
If I recall correctly, a group of American tea makers got pissed off when the British lowered taxes on imported tea, so they went and pitched a bunch of it overboard to protect their own financial prospects. They tried to throw the blame for the incident on Native Americans by dressing in costume when they went.
Even if I totally buggered up my recollection of facts in the book, it's still a great read.