The elections in our country are important to us.
To assure the value and continued success of our democracy, we must have confidence in our election system at all levels of government. To have that necessary confidence in our system, we must have verifiable and verified processes in place that can be trusted by all parties: all political parties, each citizen and each elected official.
Unfortunately, both of the major political parties appear to be satisfied with the present situation that includes a lot of questions, makes many voters distrust the system, and is provably rife for fraud and abuse in many states and districts.
This is not a technical problem, or even a very difficult problem. The solutions are well known and well understood, and have been inexpensively available for years.
The machines that are used for voting have to be simple, reliable, trustworthy and verified in their operation. Doing this in the modern (computerized) era means having commodity hardware that is well-known and verifiable by all stakeholders and having that commodity hardware running verified source code software that is published and verifiable by each stakeholder. This means that all the software should be copyrighted under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), as published by the Free Software Foundation so that all interested parties can validate the software (or pay someone else to do that for them).
Having all parties capable of vetting and verifying the hardware and software of the voting machines, and having the publicly supervised audits of both hardware and software to prove the trustworthiness of the equipment allows for confidence in the system by all concerned parties, and cheating by none.
This sort of hardware and software solution is the only verifiable way to operate vote scanning and tabulating machines. All across the country, both major political parties have shied away from their responsibility to their constituents by turning the control of our elections over to contracted third parties that are not audited by the public, are running proprietary software on dubious hardware, and have proven to have political agenda of their own. This is not a system intended to provide democratic stability and value, and the current system cannot be trusted by any of the sincere and honest stakeholders. Both political parties have accused the other of cheating, yet neither party works to solve the problem, even though the problem has been acknowledged for years and the trustworthy solution is well known.
Solving the obvious, well-known and widely admitted problems with our vote tallying hardware and software is important, but is only one step in a much longer process if our experiment in democracy is going to have a chance to succeed. After the machine hardware and software problems are solved, we also need to deal with other issues affecting our ability to control and operate our own country, such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, vote fraud, viable and binding “None Of The Above” vote options, election campaign financing reform, and so on. But none of those problems can get solved without a secure and verified network of commodity hardware running GPL’d software to give voters the assurances necessary to make them believe their votes matter.
• Bill Arnold lives in Juneau.
