Why Governments must make voting systems open source

By David M Williams
Thursday, 13 August 2009 19:33

Opinion and Analysis

Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold,  patched a security weakness in its electronic vote tabulation software this week. Nice, but how many flaws are required before governments mandate open source solutions?

One of the philosophical arguments often brought out in support of open source software is the democratic process.

Open source doesn’t just mean “free” as in “no cost.” Contrary to the view purported by many commercial software houses, open source also isn’t synonymous with “low quality.”

What free open source software – or FOSS – really offers is confidence, trust and peace of mind. It offers transparency. Its inner workings are plainly divulged and can be analysed by anyone who is competent to do so and has the inclination.

Each year grassroots communities of open source advocates celebrate “Software Freedom Day” which strives to win crowds over to a new regime of software, most notably the Linux operating system and Open Office application suite.

Open source software isn’t just about getting something without having to pay for it. A major goal of Software Freedom Day is to convey the philosophical argument that technology must be trustworthy and the only guaranteed way of ensuring this is through open source, not proprietary, software.

An oft-repeated argument is that of electronic voting systems. How can you trust a system like this if you do not know how it works and you cannot see it working.

Conventional manual election processes permit voters to see their name be marked off the electoral roll. Scrutineers of any political persuasion are free to observe the ballot box being stuffed. They can see it is not tampered with. They may observe the counting of the votes and that all aspects are conducted properly.

Even if the results of the election are not to your personal taste any reasonable person may have confidence in the legitimacy of the result because they know the processes are transparent and trustworthy with visible checks and balances.

By contrast, a proprietary, closed, electronic voting system does not offer the same degree of assurance. To trust its results you must trust the vendor.

The strength of this argument cannot be underestimated. It is not merely rhetoric because Premier Election Systems – formerly known as Diebold – in the United States continues proving the argument to be true.

With Premier’s latest gaffe being made public it surely must be time for the US to declare enough is enough and mandate electronic voting systems be open source.