Open-Source E-Voting Heads West
As Reported by Kim Zetter of WiredNews:

A California college student is planning to develop a new electronic voting system based on open-source software created in Australia.

Scott Ritchie was one of dozens of activists who appeared in Sacramento last Thursday before the California secretary of state's Voting Systems Panel to express criticism of e-voting systems currently being used in the United States. 

Ritchie, a 19-year-old political science and math student at the University of California at Davis, told the panel that he was launching the nonprofit Open Vote Foundation, which plans to modify the Australian code to meet California election standards and offer it free to any voting vendors that want to implement it in their systems.

Software Improvements, the Australian company that created the system, owns the copyright to the program but has distributed the source code online under a general public license, which means anyone can use it.

The Australian system, called Electronic Voting and Counting System, or eVACS, was used in an election in the Australian Capital Territory in 2001. It will be used there again this year.

Unlike U.S. voting systems, which use proprietary, secret software written by private companies, the Aussie system was created by Software Improvements in conjunction with an independent government body. The government placed draft and final versions of the source code on the Internet so the public could review it and provide comments.

The system took only six months to create and runs on Linux, an open-source operating system that also is in the public domain for anyone to use.

Ritchie plans to modify eVACS to include a voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, which California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley mandated must be included with all e-voting machines by July 2006.

The VVPAT would let voters independently verify that the machine cast their ballot correctly before the paper receipt goes into a secure ballot box to serve as a backup of the e-votes.

Ritchie's group plans to build the system for California first and then offer it to vendors to modify it for use in other states. He said several computer experts have expressed interest in helping to write and review the code. He also expects vendors, in keeping with the open-source ideology, will let the public see any modifications they make to the code.

"The goal of the foundation is to oversee the project and tell the programmers what they need to do according to California law, and then to build a prototype machine," he said.

Ritchie's group isn't the first to develop an open-source voting system in the United States. The Open Voting Consortium, led by Alan Dechert, a software test engineer and application developer, began plans in 2000 for a free-software voting system using simple personal computers. Dechert worked for the past three years to collect a team of experts, meet with California election officials and test a prototype.

The consortium's system was supposed to be ready for testing last October, but is behind schedule. It expects to have the demo model ready next month and be fully operational with a certified system by 2005.

Ritchie said the Open Vote Foundation can create its system at a much lower cost than private vendors, since it will use volunteer programmers, and the materials for building a voting machine are not expensive.

"The major cost with voting machines is in development and support contracts," Ritchie said.

Ritchie said U.S. voting systems are too expensive. He joked to the panel that Florida's Broward County spent $17.2 million on touch-screen voting machines, "and they all suck.... You give me $17.1 million, I'll take the Australian code (and) make a machine that doesn't suck."

The average cost of an e-voting terminal in the United States is $3,000.

The Australian system cost $125,000 to develop and implement the software, and about $75,000 for the 80 machines running it in polling places distributed around the Australian Capital Territory. The machines, which were standard off-the-shelf PCs, cost the government the equivalent of about $750 each.

Matt Quinn, lead engineer for Software Improvement's voting system, was pleased to hear about Ritchie's plan. 
 "The market's big enough for Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S (the three top voting machine makers); and it's certainly big enough for more than one free-software offering," he said. "Obviously I'd like our system to be successful, but there's certainly no reason why no other systems couldn't be successful, too. I think it's about time."

Some voting activists say all voting code should be open source so the public can ensure that the code is doing what it's supposed to do and doesn't contain security flaws.

But Rebecca Mercuri, a computing expert on e-voting machines and a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said that open source alone is not a panacea for the fundamental security problem with computers which is that there is no way to confirm that the software is doing only what it's designed to do and not something else.

"A crappy open-source system that can be modified readily is no better than a closed-source system. In fact it could be worse," she said. "When you have open-source software, people can modify it and change it however they want."

Mercuri said open-source systems give people a false sense of security because malicious code that could alter an election still can be installed in the operating system on which the voting program is running or in the compiling programs that turn source code into an operational program.

What's more, election officials have to make sure the system is implemented correctly, and have to find some way to ensure that all of the code they review is actually the code that runs on the system.

Pointing to recent events in California where Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software in 17 counties without the state knowing it, Mercuri said that "open source provides no additional protection from people who are intent on putting uncertified software in machines used in an election."

But even with extra precautions, she said, there still is no way to catch all types of sophisticated Trojan horses that might be slipped into code.

This is why Mercuri was one of the first computing experts to stress the need for a voter-verified paper audit trail to provide a backup for votes.

"Open source provides some layer of protection, but that doesn't mean you can remove other security mechanisms, such as the ability to do an independent recount with the system," Mercuri said.

Software Improvement's Quinn agreed. The company initially built its system to offer a VVPAT, but the Australian Capital Territory opted not to use the option, due to increased cost.

To read Wired News' complete coverage of e-voting, visit the Machine Politics section.