Sherman Boyd

The latest Diebold debacle makes one think. If a county clerk is fired for attempting to assess the security of these voting machines, and the public is not allowed access to the source code then our Democracy has taken a fundamental shift. Our current sytem is open and verifiable. The system provided by Diebold is not! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against computer based voting. In fact I think it is a good idea. However I think that a voting system needs the following to be compatable with American Democracy:

1.) Open Source

The American public has a right to know exactly how each vote is tallied. This means that the source code and design of any voting machine needs to be made available for public review.

2.) Immutable

A hard drive or flash card is not an acceptable media for storing votes. Each vote should be recorded on at least two permanent media sources. This redundancy is necessary to protect against equipment failure. For example the vote may be both printed out and written to a cdrom.

3.) Verifiable

Furthermore each vote should have a cryptographic checksum, which the voter receives as a receipt. The checksum will not show the actual contents of the vote, just that the vote was counted and is unaltered. The voter should be able to verify his vote online, and also could submit his receipt to his party or an independant observer.

For more information on the Diebold voting fiasco:
SecurityFocus
BradBlog
Wired
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