[governance] Open Source Voting Software Concept Released

[Paul Lehto]

We agree voting systems must be as open as possible.

My point, however, is that computerized systems can never be open
enough.  Yes, open source is better than closed, to be sure.  But
"open" source in a democracy means that not only the worst suspects
(the vendors and the insiders) have access to make changes but also
all the voters and non-voters.  As both voters and non-voters have
incentives and motivations not just to correct software but also to
rig it, "opening" the software to changes will only mean that
sophisticated outsiders have a chance to also rig the software in
addition to the usual insiders.  The situation is quite different with
regular software where all want the software to work well, and this
unity of interest can allow open source to do its magic.

We can put a man or woman on the moon, but only because all the
engineers fundamentally agree on the goal and the general means of
doing it.  Then the more eyes open for errors or opportunities the
better.

But with elections, we have folks who want to eliminate the space
program, some perhaps who want to see the astronauts dead because they
are of a "vile" political orientation, some want the spaceship to land
in their state and others in their state.  In other words, the radical
lack of unity of interest makes a common project a basic impossibility
if our goal is something approaching perfection.  And since elections
are pure procedure, something approaching pure perfection must be
achieved because a defective procedure is nothing but that: Defective
and void.

I'm all for computers and open source in many contexts, but the
extremely unique considerations as applied to IMPORTANT elections that
are binding in nature militates strongly against their use.

Example: I trust a computer auto-pilot to guide a plane I"m on. But to
analogize to elections, we'd have to posit strong disagreement among
not only passengers and crew members about how to fly, but where to
land, we'd have to let every single "voter" on the ground have access
to a voting machine capable of uploading a virus that affects the
overall "result" of the plane, we'd have to publish a year or more in
advance the one day per year this plane will fly, and load the plane
with billions of dollars and immense power for anyone capable of using
a virus to control the plane.  And if one succeeds in crashing the
plane, the incumbents stay in power until a proper election can be
had, in order, they will say, to "avoid anarchy."

In the plane example above, opening the code to open source is only
making the problem worse, since no volunteer can detect all double
trojan horses and in any case we've no way to know for sure if a
volunteer's honest or if they're a true computer genius, and in any
event, even a genius can't honestly certify they've detected all
trojan horses in a piece of software, and even if they could, there's
no necessary connection at all between the escrowed/tested software
and what's really running the plane in real time.

One would have to be a fool to board this once a  year flight for all
these financial and political high stakes, if the plane is run by
computers, even if they, like I, normally have no problem with
computers assisting in the flights of planes.

Paul Lehto

PS If you are of Finnish or perhaps Estonian descent, "moikka" to you
Tapani Tarvainen.  Harri Hursti of Finland stars in the movie "Hacking
Democracy" showing how to change an election given access to one
voting machine for about 5 minutes.

On 10/29/09, Tapani Tarvainen <tapani.tarvainen at effi.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 08:32:30AM -0400, Paul Lehto (lehto.paul at gmail.com)
> wrote:
>
>> Sure.  Open source inspectors could still be paid. But by whom? The
>> government? If so they are disqualified by conflict of interest since
>> the government's own power is determined by elections.  If paid by a
>> private party, they are not truly acting in the public interest even
>> if the claim to be...  Only citizen violunteers will truly
>> (potentially) act in the public interest, and only ON THE WHOLE -- not
>> individually.  And these volunteers just don't have the resources to
>> keep up with professional hackers.
>
> Perhaps I misunderstood you - I thought you were saying closed
> source is better than open in the context of election systems.
> If your point was that open source does not solve the big problems,
> fine - I'll grant that even if it is better than closed source here,
> by itself it doesn't make much of a difference.
>
> But in principle I think voting systems (electronic or otherwise)
> should be as open as possible in all their aspects, so that all
> who want can inspect them to convince themselves of their fairness,
> and that implies open source (or at least public source),
> among other things.
>
> --
> Tapani Tarvainen
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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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