[SATLUG] OT: Making sure my vote counts

[Charles D Hogan]

Borries Demeler wrote:
>>Samuel Leon wrote:
>>
>>>E-voting is insane.  <---- period
>>>
>>
>>I'm sure people said the same when we switched from raising hands to the
>>paper ballot system.
>>
>>Electronic voting suffers some of the same problems as paper voting.
>>It's only as secure as we make it. (We being the people that set up the
>>entire process.) Personally, I'd like to see the voting software be open
>>sourced and use gpg. They should use those little minicds (the business
>>card sized ones) and people coming in to vote, can use that as their One
>>time use gpg key to sign their vote with. then they keep that key and
>>verify it later. The soft for the verification would be on that cd as
>>well. It'd not be too horribly difficult for the average computer luser
>>to use. But it'd be radically different for the voting process.
>>And OMG OPENSOURCE IS THE DEVIL!!!!11
>>or whatever those nutjobs would say.
>>
>></rant>
> 
> 
> David,
> 
> I am with you on this - the technology AND the process could be adapted
> such that there is a very high degree of reliability and confidence. First
> of all, the source code needs to be public so it can be scrutinized
> by anyone.  Second, your idea of using PGP is an obvious solution to
> one type of voter fraud and should be used. Thirdly, machines need to
> certified and secured, if necessary by cameras, guards, whatever, before
> the election by a process transparent to anyone. A paper record would also
> help to add confidence. Machines should be physically disconnected from
> the network until a backup copy of the data has been made.  All software,
> data, etc. should be md5summed to make sure no tampering has occured.
> 
> I am sure there are enough technologically savvy people in the open
> source arena to come up with a system we could all trust a lot more
> than what's available now. To leave this up to Diebold is scary.
> 
> -b.


The problem is not a lack of tech savvy people.  The problem is the big 
business lobby spreading their FUD to elected officials about how open 
source etc... cannot be trusted since everyone can see the code to try 
finding ways to break it, yadadadada.  Once the pols become convinced 
that open source is not evil, then change will probably follow shortly. 
  That is, of course, assuming that a majority of pols in office are not 
there because their races were rigged in their favor by the voting machines.

c