WorldChanging hasn't up until now done an entry focusing on electronic voting, but regular readers should be able to guess our position: good idea (since it makes voting more accessible to the disabled and non-English speakers) but it needs to be made more trustable. American experiences with electronic voting, by and large, haven't been all that encouraging, including obvious miscounts with no way of recounting, proprietary software found to have serious security flaws [PDF], and more. But there are solutions.
Verifiable voting is key: the e-voting machine produces a paper print-out to allow the voter to check that the machine recorded his or her vote correctly, then stores those paper ballots for later spot checks (and, if necessary, hand recounts).
The buggy proprietary code problem also has a straightforward (if radical) solution: use open source/Free software. It's far less likely that security flaws will slip through (let alone intentional backdoors) if the code is open for everyone to examine. Problem is, the big e-voting companies have no desire to open up their proprietary software.
Fortunately, a solution is at hand. Wired News has an article today about the Open Vote Foundation, a nonprofit started by a 19-year-old political science and math student at UC Davis, Scott Ritchie. This group (which, at this point, may just be Ritchie, but will likely grow quickly) intends to offer open source voting software to the state of California and, later, to other regions. The software they'll use is a modification of eVACS, the Electronic Voting and Counting System created (and GPL'd) by an Australian firm, Software Improvements. And the code isn't untested betaware -- it was used in Australia in 2001, and an updated version will be used again this year.
The use of an open source/Free voting system would be a big step in awakening people to the possibilities inherent in distributed/collaborative security, where we all look out for each other in the ways we know best.
