Counting Every Vote

California's secretary of state says open-source software is needed to safeguard electronic voting systems.

California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, believes that open-source software should be used in elections involving electronic voting machines, to protect against error and fraud.

Credit: Technology Review

Speaking in Cambridge, MA, yesterday during a panel discussion at the EmTech organized by Technology Review, Bowen noted that individual counties are currently responsible for purchasing voting machines. Often the choice is left up to an IT professional who may lack detailed knowledge of cryptography and computer security. But the biggest concern, according to Bowen, is a lack of access to the machines' underlying code. "Many times, a person has no legal right to review the software, even if they could," she said.

Bowen has a history of pushing for greater transparency and accountability in election technology. After taking office in November 2006, she commissioned a top-to-bottom review of e-voting systems, including detailed analyses of source code, documentation, security, and usability. "All of the systems had security issues," Bowen said.

The study revealed a variety of problems, from software vulnerabilities that could let an attacker install malicious software that changes the outcome of a vote, to opportunities to tamper with the devices while they are held in storage.

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E-voting companies are working to address these problems, but Bowen is still frustrated that the software running on voting machines is proprietary.

When asked about future elections, Bowen said the one technology she'd like to see integrated into voting systems tomorrow is open-source software for creating ballots and tabulating votes. Both tasks are horrendously complicated, she added, and so need to be very carefully monitored. For example, Los Angeles County alone may use 330 different ballots for a single election, because dozens of local races may be going on in different neighborhoods. And one common problem there with early deployments of touch-screen voting machines was that voters were presented with ballots that didn't show all the races that applied to them.