Nice, I'm looking forward to USA's voting software landing on GitHub.
Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
61–70 of 144 posts
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That in itself is a problem because the ability for the voter to prove who they voted for opens them to coercion or bribery. Although doing it online (or by post) opens that risk anyway.
Can verify != can prove to a third party
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#63Sadly many of the identifiers are named in estonian. Limiting this project to estonian developers only. I'm aware that this is _estonians_ voting system, but i'm sure there are developers all around the world who would be interested in contributing (especially security audits would be interesting) to this project without the necessity to reverse engineering/translating the code.
Naming variables in national language is typically done by students or otherwise inexperienced programmers.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#64The title is wrong (the article isn't, necessarily). The license, https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine/blob/master/LICENSE, is non-free/open source.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#65Creative 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?
Do you not?
Of course it's not reliable, but for a quick heuristic I've found it to be quite well correlated with the quality of the code.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#66Common, not a single positive comment ? Things in the administration always take time. At least it's a move in the right direction. Next add a build CI to produce signed images. Then propose USB keys for people to boot their own system on the voting booth. At least it's better than the Diebold debacle in the states.
IMHO internet voting falls under "because you can does not mean you should".
There are two parts to this story:
-Estonia has an internet voting system
-Estonia just released the source code to their voting system
Even if internet voting is a terrible idea, a transparent election system is a very good idea, and releasing the source code for your voting system is a big step in that direction.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people are in circumstances where those they can't escape from (parents, abusive boyfriends, etc) will physically assult you for voting for the guy they didn't like. In the more general case, you can lose friends not going with the collective choice, and open ballots expose that, which makes more people vote for the guy their friends want rather than what they want to maintain social acceptance.
Those are extreme cases! I hope your family isn't beating you often, for your voting habits.
Security which is only effective in the absence of an "attacker" isn't security. This is why we engineer for the worst case.
As an aside: as a failure mode, I'd rather see vote selling than punishment or torture.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the point of this feature. The point is that if your computer is infected with malicious software that blocks or manipulates your votes then you can detect such things.
...assuming you are willing to believe your smartphone display too.
Two or more points of verification are stronger than one.
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, E-voting could revolutionalize politics. Right now, we have to have presidents, prime ministers, even kings; making all the big decisions for us because that was the only practical way. E-voting makes it possible for the population to be consulted on any major decision. This, IMHO, is the reason it's so unpopular amongst politicians. Right now in the UK, for instance, MPs get to vote on their own salary inc…
Consulting everyone on every major decision isn't the best way to make decisions (who says the majority is right?). Most people wouldn't understand the issues they are voting on and would be heavily swayed by the media.
Agreed. There are interesting intermediate forms of representative democracy though. Most forms of voting are actually delegation and it would be nice to be able to do that in a more nuanced way than "kick the bums out, and empower other bums with basically the exact same views"
Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public
#70The title is wrong (the article isn't, necessarily). The license, https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine/blob/master/LICENSE , is non-free/open source.
The "Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License" is an "open source" license. The source code itself is "open" and can be redistributed for free (beer not speech). But it is disappointing that they have opted to prohibit derivatives, and it makes their posting of the code to GitHub an interesting choice.