
Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released - jacquesm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source
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goodkarma
Documentaries such as "Recount" and "Hacking Democracy" have made me sick to
my stomach - and for a while now I've been questioning the fundamentals of the
'Democracy' that we have been shoving down other countries' throats all these
years.

I for one am thrilled to hear about something like this. I think it is long
overdue and it has a number of benefits:

1) will save taxpayers money in the long term

2) will create a platform that many developers can review and audit, thus
helping improve security and preventing fraud

3) will create a de-facto standard for how we vote, and hopefully over time
become used by more and more counties

4) will provide a better level of technology so even poorer counties can
(hopefully) upgrade to a high tech and more accurate voting system

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caffeine
Did it really just say they want to do it in Rails? Never heard of anyone
proving the safety of a Rails app.

For that matter, not sure what language they _should_ write it in. Maybe
Standard ML?

All I know is that Rails is awesome for building a lot of cool stuff very
quickly - but there are better solutions for building a _single_ thing that is
indestructible.

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goodkarma
There's lots of different software involved here. They said "the election
management components are built with Ruby on Rails".

I don't want to get into an argument about the security of the Rails framework
specifically - as an active developer I know there have been several issues -
but I doubt anyone can guarantee that anything will be indestructible forever.

If you felt strongly about it and wanted to rewrite that portion of their
codebase in another language and framework, I'm sure they would accept your
code contribution.

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jeremyw
I see lots of discussion of process on the OSDV site and wiki, but nothing
about vote verification. There's pedestrian validation of hardware and
software in machines, but no cryptographic method for voters to check that
their vote was included in the final tally, in a David Chaum sense.

Without tamper-resistant algorithms, this is just Diebold++.

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goodkarma
Perhaps but I think it's a great start.

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Shamiq
This is cool. I think we need open source ATMs too.

