Re: Fwd: Draft of Citizens for Verifiable Voting - Position Statement

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rich and everyone else,

looks good.  One thing I'd like to address:

> > Ø     Allow no secret or proprietary software in any voting machines 
> > or vote counting machines.

I suggest that we go with the wording that we approved at the meeting -
"no secret software" - by removing "proprietary" from the above sentence.  
I don't think that there are any practical advantages to leaving it in at
this point in time, and I suspect that there are some practical
disadvantages.

It seems to me that the primary advantage of stipulating non-proprietary
software is that any voting machine vendor can adopt the software and run
it, rather than needing to "reinvent the wheel" for their voting platform.  
This is good, but it doesn't address any of the security and verifiability
aspects of electronic voting, which are our primary concerns as a group.
Those security aspects are addressed by a requirement for "no secret
software," which as I understand it, means that the software source code
must be available for public review, similarly to the Australian system
that was described earlier in one of Evan's posts.

Here's the primary disadvantage of stipulating non-proprieary software, in
my opinion.  Since no non-proprietary software packages are presently
available for electronic touchscreen voting, optical scan ballot tallying,
or voter roll management, I think it makes us look impractical to keep a
requirement for "no proprietary software."  It seems to jeopardize our
"success" criterion.  It is effectively the same thing as saying that all
voter rolls must be kept on pen and paper, and all ballots must be tallied
by hand, until non-proprietary software solutions are developed and
thoroughly tested.  [ While hand-counting and keeping paper voter rolls
probably wouldn't be catastrophic, it doesn't seem to match up with the
consensus priorities of the group as we discussed in the meeting. ]

While I certainly would prefer to have non-proprietary software on general
principle, the requirement for open source code -- "no secret software,"
if you will -- is much more important, and addresses the fairness and
security issues that most directly concern us.  I suggest that we remove
"proprietary" from the above point, at least until some non-proprietary
packages exist, or perhaps moderate the language such that we state that
we prefer, but do not require, non-proprietary software.

thoughts, anyone?


thanks again for typing this up, Rich --


- Paul