Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Open source: How e-voting should be done

An open source approach to open voting systems is essential to the integrity of an electoral process. Here's a technical blueprint for securing the vote
Page:

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." -- Joseph Stalin

In the past eight years, elections in the United States have taken on the guise of a TV game show, with the elections themselves not quite as compelling as watching voting mechanisms fail across the country, especially in key battleground states. Pols and pundits from both sides of the aisle are quick to place most of the blame on faulty electronic voting systems. But until the US sets a technical policy that favors open voting systems, as Australia did in 2001 with its open source eVACS (Electronic Voting and Counting System), we have only ourselves to blame.

The closed source approach to disenfranchisement

Current US policy ensures that e-voting remains in the hands of very few proprietary vendors, including the much-maligned Diebold, which has received so much bad press that it has renamed its voting machine division Premier Election Solutions.

Don't let the new name fool you. Little has changed about e-voting systems, which take on several forms, including the two most common: touchscreen devices and optical-scan readers. What they have in common, however, is that they all use closed source code. In many cases, even the manufacturers don't have the source code to software running on their own systems. Premier Election Solutions recently advised that its machines lost votes in Ohio primaries due to an incompatibility with McAfee's anti-virus software. In the words of XKCD, someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong. Later, Premier claimed that its own software was at fault.

More often than not, however, blame for e-voting failure is placed on the storage media of these devices, either due to their relative fragility or their apparent ease of tampering.

When results from elections conducted on e-voting systems are called into question, manufacturers point the finger at defective "memory cartridges." Those of us in IT know that if all flash storage were this error-prone, digital cameras and iPods wouldn't exist. Worse, we know it's far simpler to pocket or swap out a small flash card containing a few thousand votes than it would be if those votes were recorded on paper ballots.

Another problem of current e-voting systems is that many still in operation provide no paper trail. Americans can't fill up their cars or access their bank accounts from an ATM without being prompted to print a receipt, but in many voting precincts, we can vote with nothing tangible to show for it.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: e-voting, open source
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Oracle SOA Suite – Oracle BPEL Process Manager
    Changing markets, increasing competitive pressures and evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on IT to deliver greater flexibility and speed. In response to these challenges, leading companies are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a means of delivering on these requirements by overcoming the complexity of their application and IT environments. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Optimizing Data Quality in the Enterprise - How to Tackle Your Bad Information
    Data quality – the measure of data accuracy, completeness, and consistency across a business – has become the core focus of information management efforts among many of today’s organizations. Problems with data quality continue to plague corporations of all types and sizes. In this paper, we will discuss some techniques companies can implement to enhance data quality across the entire enterprise. We will also highlight data quality management solutions, which provide businesses with the ability to effectively and economically enhance the correctness, completeness, and consistency of information in each and every system within their technology infrastructure.
    Learn more »
  • Webcast: Innovation Driving UC Everywhere: From Mobile to the Cloud and Beyond
    Polycom announced it is acquiring HP's Visual Collaboration Business Unit, including HP's Halo products and Managed Services, and the two companies have entered into a deep strategic agreement through which Polycom will become HP's exclusive partner for telepresence and video UC solutions. This will create an end-to-end UC solution that will deliver to our joint customers an unparalleled user experience, interoperability, investment protection, and ease of deployment. Watch this webcast.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.