[governance] Open Source Voting Software Concept Released

[Paul Lehto]

Given that, in an important election, a cheater or an insider can
economically justify spending up to billions of dollars in a
sophisticated cheating regime (given the trillions in spending that
might be controlled not to mention control of the world's sole
superpower if the election is for the presidency of the USA), how can
volunteers possibly keep up with that?  They can't.  Unlike other
scenarios where open source philosophy and approach can work
beautifully, it can't in elections.

Sometimes people say if the Apollo project could put men on the moon,
then surely we can design a computerized voting system that works.
This is not true for numerous completely fatal reasons, but I'll give
just two.

(1) Software, whether open source or proprietary is intrinsically
invisible, and any escrowed software has zero necessary relation to
software actually used on election day, not can the identity of the
two ever be proved, nor can it be proved that a given piece of
software is, for example, free of double trojan horses.  See
"Reflectionso on Trusting Trust."  Viruses may well be found, but
there can be no confidence all of them are found, and the incentive to
place a virus there, with important elections, is basically the
largest incentive in the world (control of the world's sole superpower
and trillions of dollars, etc.)

(2) Unlike the Apollo project where everyone wanted the same result
(bringing back the astronauts alive) elections are utterly different
because we all want, in real life, quite DIFFERENT results.  Some even
want the election to crash, keeping incumbents in power until a new
election can be had.  For an analogy from Apollo to elections with
computers to hold, there would have to be NASA engineering teams
peppered with engineers who had completely differing ideas about where
the spaceship should go, who should be on it, and on nearly every
other conceivable issue. Economists call this "moral hazard" but it is
much more than even just that.

Everyone who votes -- and even those who don't vote -- are all
affected by tax policy, military policy, etc. Nobody can be trusted to
write "trusted" code for elections because the incentives are all over
the place.  Therefore, the only system that can work is visible
transparency where everyone watches each other like hawks -- kind of
like at the bank teller's window.  When that happens, as in careful
recounts by teams of opposed workers, no more accurate system of
counting exists.  That's how machines are ultimately checked, in fact.

All in all, machines are a corporate boondoggle to spend billions to
create nontransparency in order to avoid some manual labor. Personso
of any country reminded of the sacrifices made for democracy and
freedom will volunteer in sufficient numbers to make a hand counting
system work, and the balance, if any, can be summonsed just like we
summons members for juries (and without such summonses, the juries
would be unrepresentative of the populace anyway!)

Paul Lehto, Juris Doctor

On 10/25/09, Jeffrey A. Williams <jwkckid1 at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> All,
>
>   Can ICANN still further afford to ignore?  Me thinks not for long...
>
> "Wired is reporting that the Open Source Digital
> Voting Foundation has announced the first release of
> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-sourceLinux- and Ruby-based
> election management software. This software
> should compete in the same realm as Election Systems & Software, as well as
> Diebold/Premiere for use by County registrars. Mitch Kapor founder of
> Lotus 1-2-3 and Dean Logan, Registrar for Los Angeles County, and Debra
> Bowen, California Secretary of State, all took part in a formal
> announcement ceremony. The http://osdv.org/aboutOSDV is working with
> multiple jurisdictions, activists, developers and other organizations
> to bring together 'the best and brightest in technology and policy'
> to create 'guidelines and specifications for high assurance digital voting
> services.' The announcement was made as part of the OSDV
> http://www.trustthevote.org/
> Trust the Vote project, where open source tools are to be used to create a
> certifiable and sustainable open source voting system."
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Jeffrey A. Williams
> Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 294k members/stakeholders strong!)
> "Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
>    Abraham Lincoln
>
> "Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is very
> often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt
>
> "If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability
> depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
> P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
> United States v. Carroll Towing  (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
> ===============================================================
> Updated 1/26/04
> CSO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security IDNS. div. of
> Information Network Eng.  INEG. INC.
> ABA member in good standing member ID 01257402 E-Mail jwkckid1 at ix.netcom.com
> Phone: 214-244-4827
>
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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026
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