So, how does E-voting work in Ireland? The government can't tell you!
national |
miscellaneous |
news report 
Monday May 26, 2003 22:08
by Phuq Hedd
P45.net article by Michael Cunningham
People concerned with the switch to electronic voting have been arguing in the abstract about potential problems. M.Cunningham decided to actually ask for the source-code that the Irish govt. has bought. He was surprised by the answer.
One of the central arguments advanced by advocates of Free Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/ and Open Source Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html is that all of the source-code for any application should be available for peer-review so that bugs can be identified, security risks evaluated and fixes made.
This is especially attractive in the case of software used by our governments, whether it's in databases used to store sensitive personal information on us (health records, criminal records, tax records etc) or running the machines which count our votes. (Farce though voting is, at least those that participate in it have some sort of assurance that their ballot is not lost or discarded by an error -- unless they have a dimpled chad of course!).
It is for this reason that many European countries are moving to the adoption of GNU/Linux as a standard for government programs.
Therefore it comes as more of a disappointment that our government _can_not_ guarantee or describe how the machines that are to tally our votes are supposed to work, nor even supply the source-code to citizens that request it.
It is time for Ireland to mandate that Free Software licenses are essential to all government purchased software.
This story is also being discussed on Slashdot:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/25/0320259&mode=thread&tid=185
Comments (4 of 4)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4Phuq Hedd and I aren't usually in agreement on much but here's a place we are. The only way to be able to trust "e-voting" is if.....
1) The source code is available upon request.
2) The object code actually loaded in the amchines is available for comparison.
In other words, anybody can compile the published source code and compare the results with the programs actually loaded. Anybody with the necessary skills, of course, but there are enough of us out here.
BUT --- that does NOT (necessarily) require what we call "Open Source" (Linux, for example). There is no reason in principle why it could not all be proprietary. Proprietary does not NECESSARILY mean secret. The holders of (commercial) rights are perfectly at liberty to allow the source code to be exmained, the object code available for comarison, etc. For that reason I would not NECESSARILY say that "proprietary" solutions can be ruled out. It'd just be easier the way Phuq Hedd describes.
I haven't the foggiest notion about the techy side of e-voting I just now that the rolling out of various forms of e-voting is a dreadful initative.
I am totally against it and believe it is merely a matter of time before a election is rigged using it.
Equally bad is, if the perception that elections are rigged or fixed becomes widespread there will be lower and lower turnouts and in a very short space of time - hey presto - no more democracy.
Anybody interested in discussing ideas on what we can do to stop the spread of e-voting drop me a mail at killianforde@hotmail.com
There is very little we agree with .But on this I do agree with him .Electronic voting in ireland is just too damn dangerous to be left in the hands of the Irish govt.I predict that once this electronic voting becomes "acceptable"to the irish pouplation .Wether we want it or not, the next thing will be compulsory voting.What happened to the none of the above party?If electronic voting comes in can we at least have an opt out from wasting our vote onpeople who dont represent our varied political views?
given the company I'm keeping (except for Killian). ;-)
Apparently the govt claim that they've done an audit on the code, but they don't/can't/won't specify what exactly they did and, more importantly, they can't allow anyone else to verify that work.
Of course the whole "voting for a non-recallable representative" system is a sham which steals power from us anyway, but this is a definite move towards a worsening of that situation rather than an improvement.
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