8 ms·

How about open source code for some makes and models of voting machine? The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain.

How about open source code for some makes and models of voting machine? The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA#Licensing_and_dissemination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA#Licensing_and_disseminat... But it's not listed here. (It's also kind of complex. "wget; tar x; ./configure ; make" probably won't get you a running instance. Still.

mi100hael 10y ago
Voting machines are products produced by private firms. Getting them to publish the source code is about as likely as getting Apple to publish the source for iOS.
- trendia 10y ago
  Actually, with monopsony it's rather simple: "If you don't publish the code, then we will have to use paper ballots."
  - schmidty 10y ago
    No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again.
    - OliverJones 10y ago
      Hmm. No effort, ever again, in open source products? I wonder what RMS, Linus Torvalds, and the BSD folks have to say about that? Seriously, the open source movement has generated some pretty good businesses. Maybe the case can be made that electoral equipment is an exception to that. But asserting the proposition doesn't prove it.
    - GenerocUsername 10y ago
      How much Innovation is there? Its a voting booth, not an iphone. It should be a solid device with open-source code deep enough to validate counting.
    - diyorgasms 10y ago
      I'm not sure if this it's a popular decision, but I don't really think the private sector should be innovating with our electoral system. Integrity is of utmost importance, and voting machines have been proven vulnerable in the past. I don't think the private sector has appropriate motivation to really get voting right.
      - pachydermic 10y ago
        The question is about who you trust and how you make sure that all the actors are being fair. Would you feel better if the government designed the machines? A lot of people would probably feel worse. Right now, you have each state's board of elections making decisions - they get observed by both parties so that they can all sign off on what's happening. Idk. You can never eliminate the possibility of fraud. I just think the likelihood of all of these actors colluding is really low... I mean congress can't even pass a budget.
      - pc86 10y ago
        Integrity being of the utmost importance is probably the #1 reason why the people put in power by elections should not be in charge of running those elections. I'm not saying I prefer Diebold, but I certainly prefer it if the only other option is the House/Senate $PARTY Caucus.
      - cmurf 10y ago
        The difficulty is the purse strings to pay for election infrastructure comes from politicians. Private firms have funds for product advocacy without advance funding from government, unlike open source solutions. So the entire field is distorted from day 0 when it comes to proprietary vs open source. A smarter thing to do would be to create a selection pool defined as any registered voter over the age of 75; and from that pool they choose their election technology board. And that board procures the election system based on the budget the legislature gives them. That is, the budget is the budget only, it doesn't say anything about what technology or brand is used, the only attachment is that funds are used for the state election system. If someone over 75 can't understand how our election system works, we're screwed, and in fact we've seen how voting systems have failed, have altered the outcome of elections, and because they had no paper trail, and no meaningful way to do recounts or audits there's no recourse.
    - deathanatos 10y ago
      I, as a taxpayer/legislator, can't contract a private company to (for a token fee) write and support a codebase that they will (as part of the contract) open source? The people win, as we get open source and hopefully transparent code. The company wins, as they're paid for their work (as they should be). I fully expect that this would be more expensive than closed source. (I'm not convinced that we should be using electronic voting at all, but that's a different debate.)
      - pc86 10y ago
        We should be using electronic voting to tabulate and aggregate the data, but at the most local level personally I think electronic but with two paper receipts (one to the voter with who they voted for, one to the state w/o) is the best option.
      - cmurf 10y ago
        Well, ostensibly, given enough time, we'd end up with a single code base, where the modular add-ons are really just about user interface, similar to how every county in the U.S. does their own ballot layout. In the old days, pen and paper could be considered to be a single code base. If you get the basic thing to do right, it's a choice, not a necessity, to have different code bases that do the same damn thing. So eventually it would be less expensive than closed source, to implement and maintain. Basically wealthier and more ideologically committed states would subsidize that reference implementation, and the rest of the country, should they adopt that open source reference, would get to use the code more cheaply. From a global perspective, there's a pretty decent chance a huge chunk of the code is already done - i.e. it could use the Linux kernel with a bunch of its more extraneous modules disabled. A handful of math libraries. A handful of UI libraries. And then a code signing mechanism from stem to stern. There's a lot more to it than that, but code wise, a bunch of it might already be written, the work is not innovating ducks but getting them in rows, and documenting it in a way that it's reproducible and ideally only boots up when it's exactly conforming to the spec. Closed source with multiple competing companies nationally by definition means many different code bases all in different maintenance states. It really is wheel reinvention over and over again.
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      Linux seems to be doing fine.
    - harrumph 10y ago
      >No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again. Good. You're talking about something that needs to handle a small handful of registers perfectly and produce a paper audit trail. Innovation is not only not needed, it should be actively suppressed due to the risk to the security of the electoral process.
- sfsinger 10y ago
  That used to be true. The market is being disrupted by new open source models. Cost of election tech should drop precipitously.
sametmax 10y ago
That would not improve things. A voting system must be able to be checked by any citizen at any moment. Most of the citizen can't: - understand a complex code. - ensure the machine is running this code, easily, conveniently or quickly. - ensure the machine is not, or will not be hacked, by software or hardware mean. - ensure the program does calculate the votes correctly, with no bug. - do any of this in an autonomous and spontaneous way required to make a check healthy.
- bbatha 10y ago
  Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Opening up code in voting machine would be leagues better than leaving it closed source. At least other experts in the field could verify it. Its also not like every citizen today can or understand all of the vote counting procedures with paper ballots, even when just constrained to their ballot.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Oh yes, I don't discourage it. I just think that you can't be satisfy with it. Open source voting machine are still an abomination for the democratic process.
    - GenerocUsername 10y ago
      remind me again how the open-source part makes anything worse than a standard voting machine?
      - daveguy 10y ago
        I think it's an electronic voting machine in general. There must be a paper ballot trail. The absolute best setup for voting is the scan-tron style paper ballot. Immediate confirmation, quick and continuous vote tallies, errors are very rare and it includes a paper trail.
      - sametmax 10y ago
        It does not. Read the entire thread before being offended.
elwell 10y ago
> The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain This was programmed by humans? http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=Packages/Dental/Routines/DENTA15A.m;hb=HEAD http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=... http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packages/Dental/Routines;h=534c92aae03124e24844473e17eb581333041251;hb=HEAD http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packag... Was released after obfuscating?
xmnr 10y ago
I've been thinking about this in the past few days, and decided to make a petition about it. https://wh.gov/iervT https://wh.gov/iervT tl;dr lets develop public-domain voting systems so we can audit them.

mi100hael 10y ago

Voting machines are products produced by private firms. Getting them to publish the source code is about as likely as getting Apple to publish the source for iOS.

trendia 10y ago
Actually, with monopsony it's rather simple: "If you don't publish the code, then we will have to use paper ballots."
- schmidty 10y ago
  No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again.
  - OliverJones 10y ago
    Hmm. No effort, ever again, in open source products? I wonder what RMS, Linus Torvalds, and the BSD folks have to say about that? Seriously, the open source movement has generated some pretty good businesses. Maybe the case can be made that electoral equipment is an exception to that. But asserting the proposition doesn't prove it.
  - GenerocUsername 10y ago
    How much Innovation is there? Its a voting booth, not an iphone. It should be a solid device with open-source code deep enough to validate counting.
  - diyorgasms 10y ago
    I'm not sure if this it's a popular decision, but I don't really think the private sector should be innovating with our electoral system. Integrity is of utmost importance, and voting machines have been proven vulnerable in the past. I don't think the private sector has appropriate motivation to really get voting right.
    - pachydermic 10y ago
      The question is about who you trust and how you make sure that all the actors are being fair. Would you feel better if the government designed the machines? A lot of people would probably feel worse. Right now, you have each state's board of elections making decisions - they get observed by both parties so that they can all sign off on what's happening. Idk. You can never eliminate the possibility of fraud. I just think the likelihood of all of these actors colluding is really low... I mean congress can't even pass a budget.
    - pc86 10y ago
      Integrity being of the utmost importance is probably the #1 reason why the people put in power by elections should not be in charge of running those elections. I'm not saying I prefer Diebold, but I certainly prefer it if the only other option is the House/Senate $PARTY Caucus.
    - cmurf 10y ago
      The difficulty is the purse strings to pay for election infrastructure comes from politicians. Private firms have funds for product advocacy without advance funding from government, unlike open source solutions. So the entire field is distorted from day 0 when it comes to proprietary vs open source. A smarter thing to do would be to create a selection pool defined as any registered voter over the age of 75; and from that pool they choose their election technology board. And that board procures the election system based on the budget the legislature gives them. That is, the budget is the budget only, it doesn't say anything about what technology or brand is used, the only attachment is that funds are used for the state election system. If someone over 75 can't understand how our election system works, we're screwed, and in fact we've seen how voting systems have failed, have altered the outcome of elections, and because they had no paper trail, and no meaningful way to do recounts or audits there's no recourse.
  - deathanatos 10y ago
    I, as a taxpayer/legislator, can't contract a private company to (for a token fee) write and support a codebase that they will (as part of the contract) open source? The people win, as we get open source and hopefully transparent code. The company wins, as they're paid for their work (as they should be). I fully expect that this would be more expensive than closed source. (I'm not convinced that we should be using electronic voting at all, but that's a different debate.)
    - pc86 10y ago
      We should be using electronic voting to tabulate and aggregate the data, but at the most local level personally I think electronic but with two paper receipts (one to the voter with who they voted for, one to the state w/o) is the best option.
    - cmurf 10y ago
      Well, ostensibly, given enough time, we'd end up with a single code base, where the modular add-ons are really just about user interface, similar to how every county in the U.S. does their own ballot layout. In the old days, pen and paper could be considered to be a single code base. If you get the basic thing to do right, it's a choice, not a necessity, to have different code bases that do the same damn thing. So eventually it would be less expensive than closed source, to implement and maintain. Basically wealthier and more ideologically committed states would subsidize that reference implementation, and the rest of the country, should they adopt that open source reference, would get to use the code more cheaply. From a global perspective, there's a pretty decent chance a huge chunk of the code is already done - i.e. it could use the Linux kernel with a bunch of its more extraneous modules disabled. A handful of math libraries. A handful of UI libraries. And then a code signing mechanism from stem to stern. There's a lot more to it than that, but code wise, a bunch of it might already be written, the work is not innovating ducks but getting them in rows, and documenting it in a way that it's reproducible and ideally only boots up when it's exactly conforming to the spec. Closed source with multiple competing companies nationally by definition means many different code bases all in different maintenance states. It really is wheel reinvention over and over again.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    Linux seems to be doing fine.
  - harrumph 10y ago
    >No effort towards innovation would then go into that sector. Ever again. Good. You're talking about something that needs to handle a small handful of registers perfectly and produce a paper audit trail. Innovation is not only not needed, it should be actively suppressed due to the risk to the security of the electoral process.
sfsinger 10y ago
That used to be true. The market is being disrupted by new open source models. Cost of election tech should drop precipitously.

sametmax 10y ago

That would not improve things. A voting system must be able to be checked by any citizen at any moment. Most of the citizen can't: - understand a complex code. - ensure the machine is running this code, easily, conveniently or quickly. - ensure the machine is not, or will not be hacked, by software or hardware mean. - ensure the program does calculate the votes correctly, with no bug. - do any of this in an autonomous and spontaneous way required to make a check healthy.

bbatha 10y ago
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Opening up code in voting machine would be leagues better than leaving it closed source. At least other experts in the field could verify it. Its also not like every citizen today can or understand all of the vote counting procedures with paper ballots, even when just constrained to their ballot.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Oh yes, I don't discourage it. I just think that you can't be satisfy with it. Open source voting machine are still an abomination for the democratic process.
  - GenerocUsername 10y ago
    remind me again how the open-source part makes anything worse than a standard voting machine?
    - daveguy 10y ago
      I think it's an electronic voting machine in general. There must be a paper ballot trail. The absolute best setup for voting is the scan-tron style paper ballot. Immediate confirmation, quick and continuous vote tallies, errors are very rare and it includes a paper trail.
    - sametmax 10y ago
      It does not. Read the entire thread before being offended.

elwell 10y ago

> The US Veterans' Administration health records software system is in the public domain This was programmed by humans? http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=Packages/Dental/Routines/DENTA15A.m;hb=HEAD http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=blob_plain;f=... http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packages/Dental/Routines;h=534c92aae03124e24844473e17eb581333041251;hb=HEAD http://code.osehra.org/gitweb/?p=VistA-M.git;a=tree;f=Packag... Was released after obfuscating?

xmnr 10y ago

I've been thinking about this in the past few days, and decided to make a petition about it. https://wh.gov/iervT https://wh.gov/iervT tl;dr lets develop public-domain voting systems so we can audit them.