Government, ICT and Open Source Software in South Africa (OpenSector) [LWN.net]

OpenSector talks with Nhlanhla Mabaso, the Open Source Manager at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). "A question was recently asked on one of the mailing lists about the possibility of Nigeria's elections being conducted on an OSS platform. This raises important questions about the transparency of election processes. Will citizens, in the future, be content with a major company, aligned to some political parties, having their results counted on this company's software without being able to freely audit the software used?"

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Auditing source code is not enough!

Posted Aug 11, 2003 21:37 UTC (Mon) by mhw (subscriber, #13931) [Link]

It is not enough to audit the source code of voting systems, because there's no way to know that the election computers are running the same program which has been published, or that some part of the operating system (or even the hardware itself) hasn't been compromised to subvert the voting software.

It is crucial to use voter-verified paper ballots, so that there is a large body of evidence which can be stored and examined later if desired, and that is very difficult to modify in bulk.

There is a proposed bill in the U.S. which would require all voting systems to meet these requirements by the November 2004 election.