So, how does E-voting work in Ireland? The government can't tell you!

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday May 26, 2003 22:08 by Phuq Hedd

P45.net article by Michael Cunningham

People concerned with the switch to electronic voting have been arguing in the abstract about potential problems. M.Cunningham decided to actually ask for the source-code that the Irish govt. has bought. He was surprised by the answer.

One of the central arguments advanced by advocates of Free Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/ and Open Source Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html is that all of the source-code for any application should be available for peer-review so that bugs can be identified, security risks evaluated and fixes made.

This is especially attractive in the case of software used by our governments, whether it's in databases used to store sensitive personal information on us (health records, criminal records, tax records etc) or running the machines which count our votes. (Farce though voting is, at least those that participate in it have some sort of assurance that their ballot is not lost or discarded by an error -- unless they have a dimpled chad of course!).

It is for this reason that many European countries are moving to the adoption of GNU/Linux as a standard for government programs.

Therefore it comes as more of a disappointment that our government _can_not_ guarantee or describe how the machines that are to tally our votes are supposed to work, nor even supply the source-code to citizens that request it.

It is time for Ireland to mandate that Free Software licenses are essential to all government purchased software.

This story is also being discussed on Slashdot:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/25/0320259&mode=thread&tid=185