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Can Open Source Save Democracy? No, Says Bev Harris
Originally published at Blackboxvoting
Discussion: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80688.html
By Bev Harris
Founder, Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Quite a wave of PR pieces have come out in the past few days about a new open source voting system -- NOT from Alan Dechert's well known Open Voting Consortium, but instead from an upstart, loosely connected to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and several cronies of the Holt-Bill-pushing verified voting fans.
So let's talk about this. I'm going to link you to Michael Hickens' piece, one of the many bloggers who jumped on this bandwagon. His article is headlined "Can Open Source Software Save Democracy?"
SHORT ANSWER: NO.
Before I get to that, and before outlining my concerns with the new "Open Source Digital Voting Foundation" concept, I'll point out that:
(1) THIS IS NOT ON THE IMMEDIATE HORIZON. The federal certification process takes two to three years
(2) Though not covered by U.S. antitrust laws, THIS IS STRUCTURED MUCH LIKE ANOTHER MONOPOLISTIC GRAB FOR U.S. ELECTION PROCESSES. This new group claims to have 26 states on board (though I doubt this) -- that would give a horizontal monopoly of over 50% of the USA; the "top to bottom" design also invokes vertical monopoly concerns, in that it wants to have the software control voter registration, ballot design, ballot counting, and even election auditing.
CAN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE SAVE DEMOCRACY?
Counting votes inside computers conceals the counting from the public. If key processes are concealed from the public, you no longer have public elections. If you don't have public elections, The People no longer hold sovereignty over the instruments of government they have created, and it ceases to be a democratic system.
The core issues are not "security" or "assuring the public" as the author of this blog assumes. The ultimate issues are public right to know, and public ability to understand their own election without need for special expertise, and public controls. You cannot achieve these simply by replacing proprietary software with open source software.
Open source software DOES achieve two worthwhile things, though it doesn't solve our current elections problems. It does enhance our ability to get freedom of information requests filled, by eliminating the proprietary exemption, and it should significantly reduce cost. But costs are also reduced significantly by public hand counts, which, when done correctly, actually do restore democracy.
Case in point: Marion County, Indiana is conducting its next election by public hand count. This is a large jurisdiction (Indianapolis). The ballot is a small one, just four ballot questions. This will provide an excellent pilot project example for expansion of hand counts, beginning with elections with only a modest number of ballot questions. Marion County estimates that all together, it will save $288,000. In fact, the cost of just delivering the voting machines (be they open or closed source) was estimated by Marion County to be $22,000!
The German high court recently banned its e-voting system because it conceals the counting from the public. Open source changes this not a whit. Instead, Germany is now counting in public, by hand.
TWO MORE HALLMARKS OF PUBLIC ELECTIONS:
(1) The less centralized, the better (the more people, the better, the "many eyes" safeguard);
(2) the public needs to be able to understand how the election works, and be able to authenticate it, without need for special expertise.
IS THIS WHAT THE SENATE HEARING ON THE ES&S MONOPOLY IS LEADING TO?
You've gotta wonder. The acquisition of Diebold's elections division by Election Systems & Software, giving it 75% of the horizontal market and a vertical monopoly as well, is being questioned by a U.S. Senate committee, but the committee chosen is a bit odd: The Rules Committee. One might expect to see this investigation taken up by the Judiciary Committee (after all, monopolies are illegal and are typically investigated by the U.S. Dept. of Justice); or perhaps the Commerce Committee ... but the Rules Committee?
On this Rules Committee are the two key Senate pushers of forced voting machine purchase, Help America Vote Act sponsors Chris Dodd and Mitch McConnell. If only they had Steny Hoyer, they'd have the trifecta. Chairing the committee is Charles Schumer, who is now pushing an unwise Internet Registration bill (and Internet registration happens to be one of the areas this nifty new Open Source Digital Voting Foundation claims to be developing).
At first, after looking at the makeup of the senate committee undertaking the antitrust examination, I thought maybe they'd be using this as an excuse to expand the powers of the EAC. Now I expect the real reason these particular senators grabbed this particular investigation was to push an open source agenda -- but not just any open source agenda.
One particular open source agenda. The specific well oiled machine produced by a bunch of the folks who had been associated with the Quixote Group, who also have been associated with pushing the Holt Bill; those folks chummy with the multi-million-dollar NSF-funded ACCURATE. Always covered by Kim Zetter at Wired News. Usually pipelined in to the New York Times Editorial Page.
By the way, not all the "open source" code is being released.
And the only comment I can offer for that is: Strange, but true.
Now, here's one of the blogs on this:
Information Week Government Blogs
Oct. 26, 2009, by Michael Hickens
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/10/can_open_sourc...
Can Open Source Software Save Democracy?
Discussion: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80688.html
By Bev Harris
Founder, Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Quite a wave of PR pieces have come out in the past few days about a new open source voting system -- NOT from Alan Dechert's well known Open Voting Consortium, but instead from an upstart, loosely connected to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and several cronies of the Holt-Bill-pushing verified voting fans.
So let's talk about this. I'm going to link you to Michael Hickens' piece, one of the many bloggers who jumped on this bandwagon. His article is headlined "Can Open Source Software Save Democracy?"
SHORT ANSWER: NO.
Before I get to that, and before outlining my concerns with the new "Open Source Digital Voting Foundation" concept, I'll point out that:
(1) THIS IS NOT ON THE IMMEDIATE HORIZON. The federal certification process takes two to three years
(2) Though not covered by U.S. antitrust laws, THIS IS STRUCTURED MUCH LIKE ANOTHER MONOPOLISTIC GRAB FOR U.S. ELECTION PROCESSES. This new group claims to have 26 states on board (though I doubt this) -- that would give a horizontal monopoly of over 50% of the USA; the "top to bottom" design also invokes vertical monopoly concerns, in that it wants to have the software control voter registration, ballot design, ballot counting, and even election auditing.
CAN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE SAVE DEMOCRACY?
Counting votes inside computers conceals the counting from the public. If key processes are concealed from the public, you no longer have public elections. If you don't have public elections, The People no longer hold sovereignty over the instruments of government they have created, and it ceases to be a democratic system.
The core issues are not "security" or "assuring the public" as the author of this blog assumes. The ultimate issues are public right to know, and public ability to understand their own election without need for special expertise, and public controls. You cannot achieve these simply by replacing proprietary software with open source software.
Open source software DOES achieve two worthwhile things, though it doesn't solve our current elections problems. It does enhance our ability to get freedom of information requests filled, by eliminating the proprietary exemption, and it should significantly reduce cost. But costs are also reduced significantly by public hand counts, which, when done correctly, actually do restore democracy.
Case in point: Marion County, Indiana is conducting its next election by public hand count. This is a large jurisdiction (Indianapolis). The ballot is a small one, just four ballot questions. This will provide an excellent pilot project example for expansion of hand counts, beginning with elections with only a modest number of ballot questions. Marion County estimates that all together, it will save $288,000. In fact, the cost of just delivering the voting machines (be they open or closed source) was estimated by Marion County to be $22,000!
The German high court recently banned its e-voting system because it conceals the counting from the public. Open source changes this not a whit. Instead, Germany is now counting in public, by hand.
TWO MORE HALLMARKS OF PUBLIC ELECTIONS:
(1) The less centralized, the better (the more people, the better, the "many eyes" safeguard);
(2) the public needs to be able to understand how the election works, and be able to authenticate it, without need for special expertise.
IS THIS WHAT THE SENATE HEARING ON THE ES&S MONOPOLY IS LEADING TO?
You've gotta wonder. The acquisition of Diebold's elections division by Election Systems & Software, giving it 75% of the horizontal market and a vertical monopoly as well, is being questioned by a U.S. Senate committee, but the committee chosen is a bit odd: The Rules Committee. One might expect to see this investigation taken up by the Judiciary Committee (after all, monopolies are illegal and are typically investigated by the U.S. Dept. of Justice); or perhaps the Commerce Committee ... but the Rules Committee?
On this Rules Committee are the two key Senate pushers of forced voting machine purchase, Help America Vote Act sponsors Chris Dodd and Mitch McConnell. If only they had Steny Hoyer, they'd have the trifecta. Chairing the committee is Charles Schumer, who is now pushing an unwise Internet Registration bill (and Internet registration happens to be one of the areas this nifty new Open Source Digital Voting Foundation claims to be developing).
At first, after looking at the makeup of the senate committee undertaking the antitrust examination, I thought maybe they'd be using this as an excuse to expand the powers of the EAC. Now I expect the real reason these particular senators grabbed this particular investigation was to push an open source agenda -- but not just any open source agenda.
One particular open source agenda. The specific well oiled machine produced by a bunch of the folks who had been associated with the Quixote Group, who also have been associated with pushing the Holt Bill; those folks chummy with the multi-million-dollar NSF-funded ACCURATE. Always covered by Kim Zetter at Wired News. Usually pipelined in to the New York Times Editorial Page.
By the way, not all the "open source" code is being released.
And the only comment I can offer for that is: Strange, but true.
Now, here's one of the blogs on this:
Information Week Government Blogs
Oct. 26, 2009, by Michael Hickens
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/10/can_open_sourc...
Can Open Source Software Save Democracy?
»
Seeing Through Sequoia's Transparent Election System
Staying Focused on the Real Solutions
10.27.09
Today's announcement of the Sequoia Frontier open-source E-voting system is a significant fork in the trail to election integrity, but it would be a mistake to confuse this half-way mark for our destination.
I had thought ES&S would be first to market with an all-open-source E-voting system. No doubt, they're not far behind. The dwindling number of E-voting vendors still in business are now obliged to follow suit or be expunged from the marketplace, and for that we should be glad.
Although Sequoia's press release is essentially good news, the operative reality is that between now and sometime after 2012 when the open-source voting system announced today is certified for use, there will be another federal election conducted with the same batch of secretly programmed black boxes that hijacked the U.S. government in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006, and skewed the 2008 primaries, and whose predecessors, more likely than not, have been manipulating elections since shortly after their introduction in 1965.
Even if it weren't so dangerous, misapplied technology would still be an unnecessary distraction from the philosophical and practical issues that are properly the core issues of electoral democracy.
It's up to the EI movement to explain to the voting public, that even though open-source code, open data schema, and human-readable data formats are undeniably improvements over the secret, closed voting software currently in use, these features do not and can not address these fundamental civil rights principles on which democracy depends:1. All aspects of the electoral process (except the casting of secret ballots) should be transparently observable and accountable to the citizenry, without the intermediation of secret actors or unobservable software processes.
2. Public elections should be a wholly public exercise, free of dependence on for-profit corporations or any technological priesthood.
Even as the E-voting industry as a whole follows Sequoia in a transition to open-source platforms, the public will remain dependent on private contractors, costly equipment, expensive upgrades, and even more expensive maintenance and service fees in perpetuity, so long as the institution of software-mediated voting is allowed to supplant the appropriately low-tech, citizen-mediated election model based on voter-marked paper ballots hand-counted in the precincts on election night, by the citizens themselves.
Sequoia Announces Open-Source, Open-Architecture "Frontier Election System"
Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Sequoia-Voting-Systems-bw-1072912684.html/...
* Press Release
* Source: Sequoia Voting Systems
* On 8:00 am EDT, Tuesday October 27, 2009
____________________________________
Sequoia Voting Systems Announces the First Transparent Election System with Fully Disclosed, Freely Available Source Code and Open Architecture Developed to Meet Federal Voting System Guidelines
Sequoia’s Frontier Election System Source Code Will Be Available for Public Download Through the Company’s Website Beginning November 2009
System Slated to Enter the Election Assistance Commission’s Federal Voting System Certification Program in Mid-2010
DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Sequoia Voting Systems officially introduced its latest revolutionary new offering – the Frontier Election Systemtm – the first transparent end-to-end election system including precinct and central count digital optical scan tabulators, robust election management and ballot preparation system, and a tally, tabulation, and reporting applications based on an open architecture with publicly disclosed source code developed specifically to meet current and future iterations of the federal Voting System Guidelines.
“Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security,” said Eric D. Coomer, PhD, Vice President of Research and Product Development at Sequoia Voting Systems. “Fully disclosed source code is the path to true transparency and confidence in the voting process for all involved. Sequoia is proud to be the leader in providing the first publicly disclosed source code for a complete end-to-end election system from a leading supplier of voting systems and software. Sequoia’s Frontier Election System has been designed to comply with all the current Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.”
Frontier is a comprehensive election system centered around digital scan Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) tabulators with patent-pending triple-relatable-records, open data formats, and publicly disclosed source code.
Sequoia’s Frontier Election System has been in active development for 18 months and has been demonstrated at various state, national, and international election conferences over the past 12 months to positive feedback from election officials and all facets of the election community. The company expects the system to enter the federal Voting System Certification Program during the first half of 2010.
“Frontier is a new system developed from the ground up with the full intention of releasing all of the source code to any member of the public who wishes to download it - from computer scientists and election officials to students, security experts and the voting public,” said Dr. Coomer. “While we are extremely confident in the quality of the software that our skilled team has developed, no software is perfect. Transparency and collaborative review will yield the most robust and secure product with the highest voter confidence.”
To this end, Sequoia will begin releasing fully functioning modules of Frontier’s systems with all source code on the company’s website at www.sequoiavote.com beginning in mid-November, 2009.
* Press Release
* Source: Sequoia Voting Systems
* On 8:00 am EDT, Tuesday October 27, 2009
____________________________________
Sequoia Voting Systems Announces the First Transparent Election System with Fully Disclosed, Freely Available Source Code and Open Architecture Developed to Meet Federal Voting System Guidelines
Sequoia’s Frontier Election System Source Code Will Be Available for Public Download Through the Company’s Website Beginning November 2009
System Slated to Enter the Election Assistance Commission’s Federal Voting System Certification Program in Mid-2010
DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Sequoia Voting Systems officially introduced its latest revolutionary new offering – the Frontier Election Systemtm – the first transparent end-to-end election system including precinct and central count digital optical scan tabulators, robust election management and ballot preparation system, and a tally, tabulation, and reporting applications based on an open architecture with publicly disclosed source code developed specifically to meet current and future iterations of the federal Voting System Guidelines.
“Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security,” said Eric D. Coomer, PhD, Vice President of Research and Product Development at Sequoia Voting Systems. “Fully disclosed source code is the path to true transparency and confidence in the voting process for all involved. Sequoia is proud to be the leader in providing the first publicly disclosed source code for a complete end-to-end election system from a leading supplier of voting systems and software. Sequoia’s Frontier Election System has been designed to comply with all the current Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.”
Frontier is a comprehensive election system centered around digital scan Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) tabulators with patent-pending triple-relatable-records, open data formats, and publicly disclosed source code.
Sequoia’s Frontier Election System has been in active development for 18 months and has been demonstrated at various state, national, and international election conferences over the past 12 months to positive feedback from election officials and all facets of the election community. The company expects the system to enter the federal Voting System Certification Program during the first half of 2010.
“Frontier is a new system developed from the ground up with the full intention of releasing all of the source code to any member of the public who wishes to download it - from computer scientists and election officials to students, security experts and the voting public,” said Dr. Coomer. “While we are extremely confident in the quality of the software that our skilled team has developed, no software is perfect. Transparency and collaborative review will yield the most robust and secure product with the highest voter confidence.”
To this end, Sequoia will begin releasing fully functioning modules of Frontier’s systems with all source code on the company’s website at www.sequoiavote.com beginning in mid-November, 2009.
