A recent article posted on slashdot (http:\/\/slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=08\/02\/03\/173241) talks about the possibility of software on electronic voting machines being open source. One claimed benefit is that open source will provide transparency and lessen the distrust that the public have for e-voting. But the article concludes that as of now there is no person or group working on it.
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The US is plagued with a massively different voting standards due to the freedom individual states have in implementing their preferred method.\u00a0 This lack of standard provides a plethora of different types of voting machines, each with their own security flaws.\u00a0 It also causes a problem for trying to develop open source code for these machines.<\/p>\n
Many opponents of electronic voting fail to take into account how insecure paper ballots can be.\u00a0 Ballot boxes can go missing, mechanical methods can fail, and other problems which even plague electronic voting such as corrupt poll workers.<\/p>\n
But even electronic voting has it’s problems, especially the way some current generation machines store and tabulate their votes, many of which we talked about in class.<\/p>\n
These problems lead many people to distrust e-voting machines.\u00a0 There are fears that “a single programmer could ‘rig’ a major election.”\u00a0 It could be because you take two things which people don’t trust, politics and technology, and you get something people distrust twice as much.<\/p>\n
By making the software open source, you provide peer review, transparency, and if you’re a fan of open source, basically ultimate zen.<\/p>\n
The main thing is that none of the voting machine makers have revealed what their proprietary code looks like.\u00a0 Another massive problem is there hasn’t been any funding for such a project, so there has not been any large group forming to develop code for these closed source machine.<\/p>\n
But things might change in the future if federal and state election organizations standardize voting machines.\u00a0 So who knows?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A recent article posted on slashdot (http:\/\/slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=08\/02\/03\/173241) talks about the possibility of software on electronic voting machines being open source. One claimed benefit is that open source will provide transparency and lessen the distrust that the public have for e-voting. … Continue reading