Open source election software

Read this article about the announcement earlier this week of an open source election system that was made publicly available. Now read this wee little blog post about why this isn’t providing us much in the way of guarantees.

The open source nature of the code is helpful in the long run, but it provides absolutely nothing in the way of assurance to voters. Ben Adida’s Helios Voting System provides voters with a cryptographic, verifiable receipt that their vote was counted. Commercial implementations or Open Source versions of this software would both still need to provide a cryptographic receipt. That’s your proof. That’s something that can support the weight of democracy.