Would you support a law requiring electronic voting machine software to be open source?

[BigJ]

Originally posted by: amdfanboy

Originally posted by: FoBoT
i think running voting machines with MS Windows is stupid

a single purpose machine doesn't need a multipurpose OS under the software

But it's soooo much work to write ir from scratch when you can just wip up some VB.NET and block Ctrl-Alt-Del.

So much work for a piece of software that determines the president of the strongest nation in the free world.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: EyeMWing

Originally posted by: amdfanboy

Originally posted by: Deeko
good lord no. that's the worst idea I've ever heard.

Why?

I see it as asking someone to vote for you. You want to know they do it exactly as you told them.

And have people know exactly how to exploit it? The voting machines would cost $8457834574374329348 due to the utterly-bulletproof-software that it would require.

More eyes that actually audit the software would be a good thing. It also adds to accountability. We can see exactly what they are doing.

I think the government should only use F/OSS.

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Toastedlightly
I say no. It would make it easier to find holes and could destroy the security of it. It could also work both ways.

I say yes. It would make it easier to find the holes and increase the security of it.

exactly, after the source was released (but way, way before the machines were used) 10,000 computer geeks would be looking over the code, and reporting any bugs/security holes.

However, I don't believe we should HAVE electronic voting machines, unless they run on a seperate network than computers (NO TCP/IP! NO Windows! Nothing that's easily accessible by Joe Hacker). Maybe something similar to the ATM network?

 

[mugs]

Wow, some of you people are really dumb. You think the hax0rs are going to find the flaws and no one else will? You think flaws will be found but not fixed before the election? The source from one of the voting booths DID leak and it had terrible security issues (the company of course claimed that it was a several year old version of the software).

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: mugs
Wow, some of you people are really dumb. You think the hax0rs are going to find the flaws and no one else will? You think flaws will be found but not fixed before the election?

thats why Id prefer open source to closed; if *everyone* has access to it, not everyone will look (since everyone isnt a programmer) but enough people will look that it can get fixed very very quickly.

with something closed source, only certain people will know about a problem (and thats *if* someone knows, since only certain people could look at it to start with) and they may or may not fix it.

personally, i dont like the idea of electronic voting anyway. we have enough problems with paper votes; id prefer we didnt have to worry about what could happen if a candidate just decided to say "hey i bet someone hacked it ... and i lost!"

That could start so many rounds of counts, recounts, lawsuits and whatnot that Im frightened to think how things might end up after something like that.