The Politics of Honest Voting

I keep hoping that a technical solution to the unaccountability of current voting technology is right around the corner. Unfortunately, each time I think we are moving in the right direction, I see more politics added. So, although Linux Journal is a technical magazine, I think we need to look at the politics of the situation and figure out how to get from politics to technology.

The problem is current voting machine technology is flawed, but we, the public, don't get to see those flaws. Beyond that, your elected officials seem to be doing their best to cover up for those selling flawed systems. Rather than write about the examples, take a look at BlackBoxVoting.org [1]. The site contains a lot of history on this topic, and it continues to add more and more information every day.

The basic situation is a company makes a voting machine and sells it. (Diebold is the example you read about most often, but it is not the only company involved.) System designs are proprietary, so there is little review of how they work. Beyond that, some federal standards are in place, but there are clear examples of them being ignored. For example, although federal standards say the program running in the machines cannot be interpreted--that is, interpret-ly executed rather than compiled--there are "approved" systems that don't meet this standard.

Now, there are many reasons we could assume that these systems are installed and continue to be used. These reasons include:

Kickbacks by the vendors to government employees
Government employees not wanting to admit they made a bad decision
Election corruption in which the intent is to modify election results

Additional reasons are likely. The reason, however, doesn't matter. What does matter is these closed systems have been proven to be flawed. The victim is the voter.

The technical question is "Why would an open-source system be better?" This is a common question, and it clearly is not limited to voting systems. The answer is simple: you (for any value of you) can see how it works. This means that errors in the system--design errors, software bugs and other vulnerabilities--can be located. If they can be located, they can be fixed.

I don't know about you, but I would prefer to have 20 software geeks rather than 20 politicians looking for flaws in the system that is going to count votes in the next election. But, today, you have companies with vested interests in not exposing flaws in their products and politicians deciding what "you" want.

My writing of this editorial was inspired by what sounded like an effort to get an open-source solution in place. I read an article about the Open Voting Consortium and went to the group's Web page [2] with great hopes. Unfortunately, after a few minutes of reading, I saw more politics.

The most prominent information on the site is the group's request for contributions totaling $1.5 million to "take back our election system". The Consortium uses the word "open" over and over on the site, but what it wants to do with that $1.5 million isn't very clear.

That is, the Consortium says its computer scientists have begun programming, and it needs the $1.5 million "to fund project completion, including certification". Now, if someone had offered Linus Torvalds $1.5 million to write Linux, he probably would have felt it was a sufficient amount. But, a voting system is pretty damn small compared to Linux. And I think we can assume it will not be a complete OS and, most likely, will be built on top of the Linux kernel.

So, back to politics. If I was to start an organization to solve this issue of unaccountability, here is what it would do:

Write and publish specifications for the design of an open-source voting system.
Open a public comment period on the specifications. The comment space likely would need both a "political issues" section and a "technical issues" section. For this effort to succeed, it needs to be politically viable.
Refine the specification based on the comments received and openly publish the final design documents.
Recruit open-source programmers willing to work on the system.
Recruit legislators willing to support the effort. This hopefully could mean getting some public funding for the project.
Build the system and make it available for free to anyone.

What if some company "steals" the idea and builds a system based on it? So what? That would be good. As long as all of the software remains open and free, we have addressed the problem. If, for example, Diebold wants to sell new machines totally based on this software and is willing to keep everything open, it is a win for Diebold and a win for the voters.

In the long run, this "commercialization" is likely to bring money back to those involved. That is, although the programmers might receive "stipends" from possible public funding, the long-term benefit for them could be working for companies that produce these machines or starting their own companies.

In conclusion, I am saying that if we can replace the politics of the current voting system scandals with the politics of open source, we all can benefit. Now, is there someone other than me out there that wants to start this organization, or did I just create yet another job for myself?