FW: NYTimes.com Article: A Really Open Election

["Pete Klammer" <pklammer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This would be a step in the right direction 
--
Pete Klammer, P.E. / ACM(1970), IEEE, ICCP(CCP), NSPE(PE), NACSE(NSNE)
   3200 Routt Street / Wheat Ridge, Colorado 80033-5452
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-----Original Message-----

A Really Open Election

May 30, 2004
 By CLIVE THOMPSON 

This fall, as many as 20 percent of American voters will be
able to cast their ballots on A.T.M.-style electronic
voting machines. But to put it mildly, these machines --
where you simply touch a screen and a computer registers
your vote -- have not inspired much confidence lately.
North Carolina officials recently learned that a software
glitch destroyed 436 e-ballots in early voting for the 2002
general election. In a Florida state election this past
January, 134 votes apparently weren't recorded -- and this
was in a race decided by a margin of only 12 votes. Since
most of the machines don't leave any paper trail, there's
no way to determine what actually happened. Most
alarmingly, perhaps, California's secretary of state
recently charged that Diebold -- the industry leader -- had
installed uncertified voting machines and then misled state
officials about it. 

Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be
able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but
only if we adopt the techniques of the ''open source''
geeks. 

One reason it's difficult to trust the voting software of
companies like Diebold is that the source code remains a
trade secret. A few federally approved software experts are
allowed to examine the code and verify that it works as
intended, and in some cases, states are allowed to keep a
copy in escrow. But the public has no access, and this is
troublesome. When the Diebold source code was accidentally
posted online last year, a computer-science professor
looked at it and found it was dangerously hackable. Diebold
may have fixed its bugs, but since the firm won't share the
code publicly, there's no way of knowing. Just trust us,
the company says. 

But is the counting of votes -- a fundamental of democracy
-- something you want to take on faith? No, this problem
requires a more definitive solution: ending the secrecy
around the machines. 

First off, the government should ditch the private-sector
software makers. Then it should hire a crack team of
programmers to write new code. Then -- and this is the
crucial part -- it should put the source code online
publicly, where anyone can critique or debug it. This
honors the genius of the open-source movement. If you show
something to a large enough group of critics, they'll
notice (and find a way to remove) almost any possible flaw.
If tens of thousands of programmers are scrutinizing the
country's voting software, it's highly unlikely a serious
bug will go uncaught. The government's programming team
would then take the recommendations, incorporate them into
an improved code and put that online, too. This is how the
famous programmer Linus Torvalds developed his Linux
operating system, and that's precisely why it's so rock
solid -- while Microsoft's secretly developed operating
systems, Linux proponents say, crash far more often and are
easier to hack. Already, Australians have used the
open-source strategy to build voting software for a state
election, and it ran like a well-oiled Chevy. A group of
civic-minded programmers known as the Open Voting
Consortium has written its own open-source code. 

But if our code were open, wouldn't cyberterrorists or
other outlaws be able to locate flaws and possibly rig an
election? Well, theoretically -- except that it's highly
unlikely that they could spot an error that escaped
thousands and thousands of scrutineers. Indeed, it may be
far easier to infiltrate a private-sector company and
tamper with its software. Diebold, after all, kept quiet
about the bugs it found in its programs -- including one
that subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore in a
single Florida country during the initial vote counting in
the 2000 election. Open-source enthusiasts, by contrast,
are precisely the sort of people you'd like to see
inspecting the voting code; they're often libertarian
freaks, nuttily suspicious of centralized power, and they'd
scream to the high heavens if they found anything wrong.