On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Adam Jacob Muller wrote: > At a recent family gathering I spent about an hour trying to explain to > various people why "open source" voting machines are more secure. But security of voting machines is not (or should not be) the issue. The issue is that we live in a democracy, and unless the average person is able to satisfy for him/herself that the voting machinery is fair, then it makes no difference whether it's open- or closed-source. I'm an open-source advocate, but I think *any* kind of computerized voting machine is disastrous. Maybe a select few among us can verify that the circuitry of the machine is OK, analyze the source code to verify that it's OK, analyze the cryptography to verify that it's based on sound principles, and analyze the binary code to verify that it came fom the purported source code. But that's not good enough. Anyone capable of voting is capable of understanding how to mark an X on a ballot, and the process of securing, counting and validating the votes. (This is the system we use in Canada.) And I direct complaints from anyone who says it will take forever to count millions of votes to /dev/null. People in a vote-counting tree can count N votes in O(log N) time. *Any* use of advanced "voting technology" is a step back for democracy, because not only does it open the system up to fraud, but it also disenfranchises the majority of the population who are now unable to understand how their votes are counted and secured, and how the counts are verified. > I simply don't understand why a company doesn't do open source voting > machines... Because it's a non-solution to a non-problem: Electronic voting machines are not only unneccessary, they're harmful. -- David.
