This is excellent news! At least some people do it right, and some politicians / bureaucrats seem to make the right decisions. The reasoning behind it as stated in the article is flawless. A stimulating experience. <snip http://it.mycareer.com.au/news/2001/07/24/FFXL76U4HPC.html> The only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL). "Online voting is a highly critical system, not in the sense that someone's life depends on it, but it has to be accurate and reliable and available on the day," Boughton said. "The main reason we went that way (GPL) was transparency and to be able to ensure the voters that everything is above board. Once you make code available anyone has the opportunity to check it out." [...] Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, in testimony in January on voting technology before the US Civil Rights Commission, adopted the axiom, "trust no one". "Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds," Jones said. "We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates." He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not. He said open source goes much of the way towards code audit accountability, especially when combined with strict version control so that code doesn't change from inspection to deployment. "Truly open source systems are valuable, but they pose threats, too, because anyone can get and modify the code. "(W)hen you're writing in an open source environment, you're forced to write for at least a degree of auditability. Proprietary code need not pass such a simple test and I suspect that much of the commercial PC software would not pass this test." Proprietary data formats, such as Adobe's Portable Document Format or Microsoft Office, should be avoided. "You cannot tell what is transmitted along with the data you intend to transmit, you cannot tell how secure it is, and you cannot tell how resistant to corruption it is," he said. [...] In its March report on internet voting, the Internet Policy Institute, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, came down on the side of open source systems. It said risks, such as cracker intrusion, were outweighed by public confidence in the systems and their ability to work between state electoral offices. Vendor concerns over the secrecy of their intellectual property were dismissed. "Most panelists believe that not only should the specifications of modules and subsystems be published, but that the implementations, that is the source code, should be published as well," the report found. "An election is not fully open if it is based on secret, that is proprietary, software. "People have a right to know, in as much detail as they are capable of understanding, exactly how their elections are conducted. In addition, experts must be able to scrutinise the system freely for problems. As a general rule, source code is made more secure the more it is scrutinised by others." </snip> <snip http://www.softimp.com.au/news.html#EVACS> Experts from the Australian National University�s Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering and developers from VA Linux Systems are part of the Software Improvements team developing the new system. </snip> Horst
