Why Governments must make voting systems open source

David M Williams
Thursday, 13 August 2009 19:33

Opinion and Analysis

Premier are no strangers to being shown up. They feature in the movie Hacking Democracy along with many reports of proven flaws.

Among these is the story late last year how a Python programmer, Mitch Trachtenberg, discovered Premier’s counting software had miscalculated ballots in his home of Humboldt County.

Even worse, after confronting Premier with evidence it turned out the company had known of this fault for four years but never disclosed it or repaired it, even though software upgrades had been released during this time.

This is disturbing on many levels. Firstly, Premier purports to make vote tabulation systems. Yet, this goal is violated. It is not like it is a “minor” goal; it is the chief objective of a voting system – to count votes!

Secondly, what Premier was miscounting was not merely whether the baker had 12 or 13 buns in a box but the will of the people. That’s not something to trifle around with.

Fast forward to this week and Premier is in the news again after patching a serious weakness in auditing. This was discovered by Wired.com earlier this year.

It seems that Premier’s Global Election Management System – or GEMS – simply failed to record significant events that occurred. It didn’t log that votes were deleted, including during and after an election.

The logs also failed to log the user who performed actions, and even recorded some events with the wrong date and timestamps.

This behaviour was in stark contrast to the US Federal voting system standards which requires audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events.

GEMS is in use in over 1,400 election districts across more than 30 states. Justin Bales, General Service Manager for Premier’s Western region confirmed that GEMS auditing facilities had not been changed since the software’s first incarnation, over a decade ago.

That’s an awful lot of elections to have taken place without auditing. Can Premier authoritatively state that no fiddling the figures occurred? The problem now is that even if votes were not deleted or tampered with it is impossible to prove it.
Premier cannot prove malicious activities have not occurred in the past.

The GEMS software has now been modified so activities, whether normal or abnormal, are logged correctly. Further, the system will shut itself down if the logging mechanism becomes inaccessible for any reason.

How many more flaws must be uncovered and how many more times must this happen before Governments around the world decide enough is enough? No longer should any electronic voting system be closed in any way.

For the sake of democracy voting systems must be open source. There can be no other choice.