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Linux Pro Magazine's Editor in Chief, Joe Casad, discusses the Open Voting Consortium (OVC). Visit the Alternageek.com site for a video interview with OVC's Brett Turner.
Some issues facing the open source community are difficult to explain to outsiders, but some are problems the whole world faces. One issue most people care about is the right to vote. What does the right to vote have to do with open source software?
The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is a group of experts devoted to ensuring that electronic voting systems remain auditable and open in future elections. This mission is actually quite consistent with the open source movement’s focus on alerting the world to the problem of private companies controlling critical segments of the economy through proprietary software. In the case of the voting machine business, a few companies control a large portion of the industry, and no one really knows if their software has problems or not, since it isn’t freely available for public review. And, as is often the case within the closed circles of closed source, proprietary hardware requires proprietary software, perpetuating a cycle of dependence that keeps the vendor in control.
joe casad Sep 22, 2008 6:50pm GMT
Isn't it true that if someone has access to the physical box that they can "own" the box if they want?
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While this is true in an abstract sense of any machine, and that many of the common machines are exceptionally bad, it is not impossible to fix many of them. Some run windows as a back end, and leave a memory card slot active in the running system, which is an easily exploitable weakness, but if you just strip the hardware driver out of the software on the system you run on election day, it is possible to plug that hole.
In any serious election polling places are monitored, and while no hardware is uncrackable, it is feasible to make hardware very hard to crack under well monitored conditions, software alone can not solve this problem, but neither can technology. Security requires systems which can be effectively administered and checked by humans, the current hardware/software makes this impossible, changing the software in many cases would make it at least possible to actually have a verifiable election.
Open Vote
joe casad
Sep 22, 2008 6:50pm GMT
Isn't it true that if someone has access to the physical box that they can "own" the box if they want?
So what does it matter if the voting software is clean, open, certified, and "perfect", if the voting machines are not secure the accuracy of the vote cannot be assured. There is a report on the net that the current voting machines can be hacked in about 1 minute.
Comments
hardware weaknesses
dgandhi Oct 24, 2008 9:43pm GMT
joe casad Sep 22, 2008 6:50pm GMTIsn't it true that if someone has access to the physical box that they can "own" the box if they want?
----------
While this is true in an abstract sense of any machine, and that many of the common machines are exceptionally bad, it is not impossible to fix many of them. Some run windows as a back end, and leave a memory card slot active in the running system, which is an easily exploitable weakness, but if you just strip the hardware driver out of the software on the system you run on election day, it is possible to plug that hole.
In any serious election polling places are monitored, and while no hardware is uncrackable, it is feasible to make hardware very hard to crack under well monitored conditions, software alone can not solve this problem, but neither can technology. Security requires systems which can be effectively administered and checked by humans, the current hardware/software makes this impossible, changing the software in many cases would make it at least possible to actually have a verifiable election.
Open Vote
joe casad Sep 22, 2008 6:50pm GMT
Isn't it true that if someone has access to the physical box that they can "own" the box if they want?So what does it matter if the voting software is clean, open, certified, and "perfect", if the voting machines are not secure the accuracy of the vote cannot be assured. There is a report on the net that the current voting machines can be hacked in about 1 minute.
jerry