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Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

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Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#3

Post by relix »

Creative Commons-licensed, written in Python using vim, shared on Github. It ticks all the boxes, just sad that the README is empty.

Unless I'm mistaken, I can't find any tests though. Maybe they didn't release it, but it's a bit worrying.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#4

Post by technimad »

No matter how open the code is. It is extremly hard, if not impossible, to ensure this code is running on the actual systems.

E-voting sounds intersting in theory, but in practice it is basically not worth the trouble. It is way more complex than a regular system with ballots and the only gain is that the results can be published sooner.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#5

Post by Lewisham »

josephlord wrote: post #2

How does a voter or independent voter know that the code that has been verified is actually running on the machine that they connect to? You have to trust the sys admins. And as we all know: something is trusted if it can break your security policy.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there.

Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't require humans and is easily verifiable at the point of voting by the average voter.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#6

Post by relix »

technimad wrote: post #4

No matter how open the code is. It is extremly hard, if not impossible, to ensure this code is running on the actual systems. E-voting sounds intersting in theory, but in practice it is basically not worth the trouble. It is way more complex than a regular system with ballots and the only gain is that the results can be published sooner.

I don't agree with that last sentence though. It's not more complex because you don't need to spread booths all around the country, get volunteers to sit a whole day at the booths, secure the ballots, count the ballots, recount the ballots, etc... It takes a lot of logistics to do papervoting and it's probably more expensive too, compared to a centralized datacenter. They probably still have booths for people without computers, but they surely need less.

Also, if voting is not compulsory, there's a lot less friction to actually go vote from the comfort of your home, whenever you want, than there is to get to a booth and stand in a queue on voting day, it would surely result in a higher turnout.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#7

Post by Anderkent »

Lewisham wrote: post #5
josephlord wrote: post #2

How does a voter or independent voter know that the code that has been verified is actually running on the machine that they connect to? You have to trust the sys admins. And as we all know: something is trusted if it can break your security policy.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there. Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't re…

There are theoretical cryptographic systems where each voter can verify that his vote was counted properly, without revealing his vote to anyone. I don't think any have been implemented in practice.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#8

Post by DanBC »

relix wrote: post #6
technimad wrote: post #4

No matter how open the code is. It is extremly hard, if not impossible, to ensure this code is running on the actual systems. E-voting sounds intersting in theory, but in practice it is basically not worth the trouble. It is way more complex than a regular system with ballots and the only gain is that the results can be published sooner.

I don't agree with that last sentence though. It's not more complex because you don't need to spread booths all around the country, get volunteers to sit a whole day at the booths, secure the ballots, count the ballots, recount the ballots, etc... It takes a lot of logistics to do papervoting and it's probably more expensive too, compared to a centralized datacenter. They probably still have booths for people without…

The UK has had problems with fathers using the votes of everyone in their family via postal voting.

I'd be interested to see if electronic voting fixes that, or makes it worse.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#10

Post by sjtgraham »

relix wrote: post #3

Creative Commons-licensed, written in Python using vim, shared on Github. It ticks all the boxes, just sad that the README is empty. Unless I'm mistaken, I can't find any tests though. Maybe they didn't release it, but it's a bit worrying.

Is the editor a program is written in really a criterion you evaluate software against?
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