John Edwards on Open Source Voting Machines

goombah99 writes "John Edwards, the presidential candidate and lawyer, is standing out from the pack by showing himself to be a bit tech savvy. In 2003 he was a guest host on Lawrence Lessig's Blog, giving his view on the imbalance between property right protection and the good of public access. As of this week he has become the first presidential candidate to support 'open source code' for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records. He's even personally using Twitter. 'Currently, software used in election systems remains the proprietary property of vendors. This situation has created a continual problem when anomalous results have been reported and independent experts are denied the ability to review how the systems work. A growing body of critics oppose this privatization of the voting system.'"

Open source election systems

As of this week he has become the first presidential candidate to support 'open source code' for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records.

That's the kind of stuff I like to hear. Putting aside whether or not elections were "stolen" in the past (how can it be proven one way or another?) it's important to have as much transparency as possible in the voting system. That way we can at least reduce the likelihood of election fraud.

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Honestly, I'm not sure open source voting machines make a big difference either way. Don't get me wrong: the present Diebold mess (and others) is a disaster. And I agree with the parent, transparency matters. But process transparency matters even more tha

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I understand your point. What I was said regarding transparency was more about avoiding a "black box" where nobody knows what's going on in the back end. With closed-source electronic voting, we have to trust that whoever made it isn't stacking the deck in

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Can we please stop getting all warm and cosy about candidates because they throw out "tech-savvy" words and we're supposed to be nerds? I find it more likely that Edwards is keen about open-source because the proprietary voting software is one possible sca

Re:Open source election systems

Can we please stop getting all warm and cosy about candidates because they throw out "tech-savvy" words and we're supposed to be nerds?

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I've been thinking we needed open-source election software (if we are to use electronic voting) ever since the whole Bush election debacle originally occurred. Am I supposed to not care when a candidate makes a statement in support of that idea? The fact that this idea also happens to be popular today with geeks on Slashdot doesn't make it wrong.

And yes, I fully realize he would not be in a position to mandate open-source voting kiosks even if elected. But it is reasonable to judge our candidates based on their views (in addition to their track records, of course), right?

Re:Open source election systems

congress makes laws, not the president...in case anyone forgot. sure, he can veto

Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party. Many of the major laws passed in the last 7 years have been written entirely by White House staff and then handed off to a sponsor in Congress. Presumably if a democratic presidential candidate wins, that will mean the democrats have at least held congress if not built an even more significant majority, so Edwards' opinion on legislative matters is hardly irrelevant.

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Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party.

I would submit that it is corporations and moneye

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process transparency matters even more than open-source transparency

The two are not mutually exclusive as you imply. We need both.

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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.

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Holmwood, you're comparing apples and oranges here. In your comparison, the closed-source system has a paper trail while the open source system does not. Here's a more apt and fair comparison:

1) The closed source system has a touch screen and no paper tr

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... accusations fly that the company has embedded a mechanism to ensure that the shrub wins.

This is such an absurd theory, and yet it seems to be "accepted truth" around here. Think for one second. Who writes code? Here's a hint - it isn't upper level ma

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The only way something like this could happen is if low level employees (ie the engineers) were complicit.

Upper management can and usually do ask their engineers for such things. They have to bring home some bucks. Management simply has to select some pro

Re:Open source election systems

Open source voting machines are useless, unless you can verify that the software and hardware in use at the time you cast your vote is trustworthy. If you can't, it might as well be a closed-source system.

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Why does it have to be at the time you cast your vote?

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Why does it have to be at the time you cast your vote?

The implication is that dishonest hardware/software could be used for an election and swapped out later for honest systems so as to make the previous election appear legitimate.

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Open source voting machines are useless, unless you can verify that the software and hardware in use at the time you cast your vote is trustworthy. If you can't, it might as well be a closed-source system.

Nonsense. Open source voting machines don't all

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And with GPLv3, you can't have the hardware restricted to only running an approved build of the software.

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No, now we just have to worry about dead people voting even more now that John Edward [johnedward.net] is involved

It's a joke. Laugh. :)

Fragmenting the vote

Ah, fragmenting the geek vote I see. You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate. Unfortunately partisinship destroys this, and geeks seem willing to get in bed (so to speak) with whoever is willing to throw them a few treats (i.e. favoring Edwards just because he utterd the words "open source", not even in support of it in general).

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You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate.

Impossible. Have you ever seen an IRC flamewar? Imagine that, but magnified.

Re:Fragmenting the vote

Actually, organizing to avoid fragmenting is what causes partisanship. Duvergers law [wikipedia.org].

Condorcet and/or approval voting solves this problem, but until we have that, we're stuck with partisanship and all the screwiness of plurality elections.

Re:Fragmenting the vote

You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate.

We can't, and shouldn't. Being a geek is only one small part of who we are as human beings. Technology issues are important to us, and in that sense we could all probably get together on who supports the positions we espouse the best.

The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war. There's the "war on terrorism." There's the issue of things like the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's immigration and visas. Of course on top of all these relatively new (or updated) issues, we have issues like education, health care, social security, civil liberties, privacy, economic policy, foreign policy, taxes, plus many others.

These are all far more important and far-reaching issues, and ones where there will be a lot of different and valid view points. We should vote for the person we believe best supports our entire range of issues, rather than trying to band together to support the biggest technology geek running for office at the time.

We should all vote our consciences in that regard. What we geeks should do, however, is band together on these technology issues where we mostly tend to agree and become an influential force on those specific topics, regardless of who we voted for in a particular election or who ended up in office.

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The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war.

LOL. You mean the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam? That's an invasion, not a war. Get over it.

For the Sunni and Shia, it's a war. For the foreign fighters, it's

Support AB 852

I work for Paul Krekorian and I hope that all Californians here will call their state legislators and ask them to support AB 852, the Secure, Accurate, Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, a bill that would require disclosed source code for all election systems. ht [ca.gov]

e-Voting never replaces public auditable elections

It is a principle mistake to think that electronic voting can ever replace manual vote counting. Or if it will replace it, then you will always lose the audibility.

If you want an election to be publicly auditable, then the only (!!) way to do it is to count votes manually by hand in public.

You can use an electronic voting machine to get a faster preliminary result, but if you give up on manual counting the electronic voting machine will become a black-box. Regardless what kind of software, security etc. you use and implement.

Re:e-Voting never replaces public auditable electi

So let me get this straight.
Paper ballots cannot be lost, thrown out, replaced, or stuffed?

Just because there are flaws with the current implementation of electronic voting, you can't sit back and ignore how monumentally fragile the paper ballot voting sys

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This cynical shit is really annoying me. Do you seriously believe that every single senator and congressman out there wants to flout the constitution and destroy the American way? Are they really all as crooked as you like to think? Get a grip!

Bush may not

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No, not all politicians are corrupt and want to flout the Constitution. However, this administration has shown enough of its true colors in the past six years to make it entirely plausible (if not probable) that they felt they had a such a mandate from God

Canada leads the way.

How open source is it in canada? It is as open as it can ever get. It is done on paper. You get a pen and a piece of paper with a list of all the candidates from all the major parties and then some. It is all counted before the turn of the day and recounts

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But is the paper distributed under a GPL???? Is it some proprietary paper, or is it open source??

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OMFG we need to switch to pen! They could be stealing our votes w/ erasers and bootleg pencils! Vote yes for pens!

Open Source dosen't matter for voting systems

According to this [nist.gov] paper

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Wouldn't the open source code still be vulnerable to an attack launched from malware embedded in firmware by the hardware vendor? Unless the firmware is open too, I think it would be.

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How can you be so wrong? Open source would completely prevent this!

How? Even if the BIOS is open source, how can you verify which code is actually installed in a given machine?

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You compile the source code and validate it against the binary that shipped with the machine.

Article in one sentence

the Edwards campaign stated that, "To ensure security, these machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records."

I know RTFA is uncalled for, or even RTFS, but maybe if I put this quote in the comments section I can head off the "It needs a paper-trail *snort*" comments. Already, those seem to make up 35% of the comments. Ron Paul comments seem to come in second at 25%, and comparisons to Canada and bad jokes seem tied at about 10-15% each.

Re:Article in one sentence

election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records

There's an article from nist linked somewhere up that page (open source doesn't help..), that says something I never thought of before: even if you have a paper trail, a compromised machine could still effect the result - by (for instance) placing a candidate's name in a hard to see place or somehow making it a bit harder to vote for them. Given the fact that quite a few people only decide who to vote for in the booth and are lazy, I could see this swinging a close race.

Not to say that a paper trail isn't a good thing, just interesting that it doesn't solve everything...

Can you really call it a Democracy with evotes?

Maybe they can tout the closed source system as: Yes, one man can make a difference*.



*Must be a Diebold programmer to qualify.

Damn!

John Edwards, the presidential candidate and lawyer ...

Damn! I was hoping to hear what John Edward [wikipedia.org] had to say about it.

He could have asked Democracy what it's like being dead...

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Actually this off topic, but the "Militia" is defined under the US Code as any US Citizen or resident male between 17 - 45 with or without prior miltary experience, to age 64 with prior military experience, and all female members of the national gaurd. So

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How well regulated is it if anyone whose simply that age is a part of it? Do we kill boys before they reach 17 if they aren't good enough to own a good?

Call me old fashion

While not impossible to forge and cheat, as they say here in Chicago: vote early, vote often, but I liked the idea of a paper ballot.

Alternative

Anything that does not need long term recording nor fast processing nor complex processing does not require a computer.

There are things that humans are not so good at. Financial systems allow data to be processed at high speed, to be stored in much less

previous discussion quote

from a previous discussion on slashdot [slashdot.org], a comment that I think bears repeating:

The "e-voting" concept should be that the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it in

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*Single* paper ballots are the best way... where the candidate/proposition options are listed, and the voter marks the item they want to vote for on the exact same sheet. The paper ballot should also be posted in the voting booth so the voter can ensure t

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Pretending that the free market can solve every problem known to man is beyond naive. The worst part is that Mr. Paul acknowledges that the military can't be disolved, but won't apply the same logic to more serious problems of civilized man: health care a

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Actually, the market can decide when surgery is a good idea. The problem is that the payer and the patient are different people. If you look at the history of healthcare costs, you will discover that the cost of healthcare began to rise significantly faste

Re:You're wrong.

He may know a great deal about health care, but I've never read an interview in which he didn't reply to that type of questioning with a non-sequitor about small government being better.

As for both Sicko and your article, neither settles this debate as both rely far too heavily on individual cases than generally applicable logical analysis. Obviously, such analysis is difficult to express sucinctly, but to me it boils down to this: The government is motivated by getting enough votes. When it comes to healthcare it can do this by keeping taxes low and/or by providing better service. On the other hand, the corporation's primary objective is to increase share price. Which it can do only by increasing profits. Profits can be increased by growing the corporation's income and growing costs at a slower pace or by cutting costs (or a combination).

The above are the facts of the situation, my decision is a result of a willy nilly hash of how I feel the shit breaks down in real life: The corporation, unable to grow itself at a rate faster than the economy (which it must do to add value) is forced to cut costs, even if this means worse healthcare. Rather than improve services it games the system to avoid losing market share. Thus, it fails to provide the same level of healthcare efficiency that the government CAN (note: not "does") provide.

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One issue with healthcare is the who-pays problem. If government offered free health care to anybody who paid at least $5000/year in Federal taxes there would probably not be an objection - most likely the level of care would end up being pretty high, and

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I like him better that Hillary or Obama. I liked him better than Kerry. Although Kerry didn't do too bad debating Bush, I think Edwards would have demolished him.. He's a smart guy, and a good speaker. I think the Democrats screwed up on the last election

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Wait, its not the same twitter? Oh that's good to know. I'd lost quite a bit of respect for John Edwards (what little I have for him considering I constantly get him confused with John Edward) when I thought he was using such blatant trolls for marketing.