Obama and McCain prove critical open source argument true

David M Williams
Wednesday, 17 December 2008 18:40

Opinion and Analysis

Trachtenberg compared his results to that of the official numbers and found precinct 1E-45’s vote count for Obama and McCain was substantially different from the official results. Sifting through the ballots and the scanned images and the software’s logs showed that Trachtenberg hadn’t made a mistake at all.

The election office began sensing the problem was on their end. Fearful they had simply not run a whole bag of votes through the Diebold machine they re-inspected their work. Yet, they had not been deficient. The Diebold just had not counted 216 ballots, although they were fed in.

Calls to Diebold confirmed a problem had been discovered that had existed in their own counting software for four years. Diebold alleged to have informed county election officials but they never notified the California Secretary of State.

Worse, Diebold released subsequent versions of their software and did not fix the problem! Some versions were used in equipment deployed to the state of ... yep ... Florida!

How do you go forward from here? Trachtenberg’s core goal was to demonstrate the practicality of independent votes but he did much more than this.

This process has forever shown the risk associated with using proprietary software in critical matters where confidence must be assured. How can Diebold/Premier ever expect each and every citizen to believe their vote is being correctly recorded when there is no opportunity for independent analysis of the software in use.

In this instance, the official result had been sealed and recorded. Yet, it was wrong. And the reason it was wrong was because of a bug that had not been corrected by the authors and which no other person would have discovered prior to an election occurring because the software was impenetrable.

Had it been open source software the problem would have been revealed far sooner and likely before even the first vote had been cast.

Trachtenberg sums it up well, “Our votes are too important to be counted by secret software running on black-box vendor machines.”

And that’s why we need open source.