Author: Jay Lyman
Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places. In the US, however, the effort to bring open source systems — and other aspects of trustworthy voting, including voter verified paper receipts — is made more difficult by the entrenchment of the major vendors: Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and others.
More stringent code review and system transparency laws and discussion are putting pressure on the Diebolds of the world. But voting officials, already under pressure themselves to provide some kind of voting system for upcoming elections, want to know about systems that offer a combination of technology and transparency that the public can trust. If commercial vendors are unable to certify systems under federal or state guidelines, is a more transparent alternative available?
Electronic voting expert Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University and director of the federally funded, $7.5 million ACCURATE organization (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections), says he is not familiar with any open source voting system efforts that are ready for the polls. “To my knowledge, all of the vendors use proprietary systems,” he says.
The only open source e-voting effort that Rubin noted was the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). “I don’t agree with everything they are doing, but they are all about transparency and open source,” Rubin said.
OVC President and CEO Alan Dechert says it would take a large investment of time and money to provide an alternative to traditional e-voting systems vendors, but he says an effort known as Open Voting Solutions (OVS) is looking to do just that.
OVS CEO Richard Johnson says by using commercial, off-the-shelf components, OVS has a system, and could leverage an arrangement with Dell to provide an alternative to traditional vendor systems.
“If we were to get a contract tomorrow to deliver a federally certified voting system that has all of its voting-specific source code at SourceForge, we could do that,” Johnson says. “We are positioned to respond very quickly.”
Johnson says that off-the-shelf components — designed, built, and marketed for non-voting purposes — are exempt from federal voting system certification requirements. The OVS software, system, and process would include monitoring of all voting machines and voter-verified printed ballots that would serve as a check on the electronic votes by being matched to them one-for-one, says Johnson, who co-founded Open Voting Solutions with David Webber after they realized such a system is feasible.
If a voting jurisdiction agreed to contract the OVS system, it would be implemented on an “appropriate operating system, such as Linux,” and would be provided with hardware help from Dell, Johnson says. It would also use the XML variant Election Markup Language, an OASIS standard commonly used in Europe for elections.
While he detailed the security, cost, certification, and other benefits of an alternative system, Johnson also conceded there are significant challenges to stepping up where the traditional vendors drop out, including varying state requirements, the need to deploy exactly what is certified, and the complicated financial mechanisms of procuring e-voting equipment.
Still, Johnson echoed others in describing a truly transparent voting system as one with open software. “I think the absolute requirement is to ensure that all the voting-specific applications be open,” he says.
Not just about the software
Verified Voting Foundation founder and Stanford computer science professor David Dill, another ACCURATE board member, says that software is not as important as overall “election transparency,” which entails equipment that is auditable, and voting processes that are open and available to observers. Dill highlighted the first need is for “publicly disclosed source.”
“Companies could still maintain intellectual property rights, so that they are the only ones who can sell it, but members of the public should be able to inspect it,” Dill says.
“There are problems with doing this,” he says of an open source effort. “Because of certification requirements, the implementation has to be very disciplined and controlled. The system really needs to be minimalistic. And there are many barriers between the software and the market, including the certification process, varying requirements in all the states, the sales process to counties and states, large performance bonds required by contracts, and providing support and maintenance.”
“Elections offices need a lot of hand-holding,” Dill says. “I would bet that some of the smaller [commercial e-voting software] vendors could be convinced to disclose their source code if they were pretty sure it would buy them a competitive advantage, but that’s just a guess.”
When it came to defining what qualifies as a truly open source e-voting system, Rubin agreed it must be transparent throughout. “I think all aspects of a system would have to be reviewable by any member of the public who wishes to examine them,” he says. “I don’t know of any vendors that claim that level of transparency.”
Rubin says the ACCURATE center’s goal is not to design or build a voting system. “Rather, it is to do basic research into technologies that could ultimately improve voting from many different angles, including transparency,” he says. “The ‘T’ in ACCURATE stands for transparency. It is one of the most important factors.”
Rubin also highlights the need for more transparent testing and certification of e-voting systems in the US, whether they come from proprietary vendors or open source groups.
“The Independent Testing Authority testing process, for example, is totally non-transparent,” he says. “Testing reports are private and not viewable by the public. This is a disgrace.”
Transparency, not only in functioning voting machines, but also in the testing and certification, is key to trustworthy e-voting, and has finally become a significant issue, Rubin says.
Category:
- Government
