[governance] Open Source Voting Software Concept Released

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 09:27:00AM -0400, Paul Lehto (lehto.paul at gmail.com) wrote:

> 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.

So far so good.

> 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 [...]

Open source does not mean you let others change the code you run,
only that they can copy it for their own use (and modify it there
if they like).
The quality of the code depends on the number of (good) people
working on it, which isn't lessened by opening the source -
it only means those working on it can get some extra bug reports
from outsiders. They don't need to (and shouldn't) accept any
code from untrusted sources.

> 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.

I agree there are strong reasons against computerizing elections
in the first place, but not that open source makes it worse -
on the contrary, I think it makes it better, if only by a tiny bit.

> In the plane example above, opening the code to open source is only
> making the problem worse,

I don't follow. How is closed source any better?

> 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.

That's all true - but doubly so with closed source, there the
number of people who can analyze it is much smaller.

> PS If you are of Finnish or perhaps Estonian descent, "moikka" to you
> Tapani Tarvainen.

I am quite solidly of Finnish descent, Finnish citizen,
resident of Finland, and have been working actively
to bury Finnish government's plans for evoting
(fairly succesfully, too). :-)
So "moikka" to you as well.

> 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.

Yes, I know him, he is pretty good.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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