Why aren't US voting machines open source?

tkchumly@lemmy.one to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 19 points –

I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don't believe the outcome. Why don't they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?

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Do you think most of the people in government know what open source means? The concept of facebook confuses them lol

does the open source connect to the WiFi? yes or no

I don't know about most, but I think the number of people in government willing to accept bribes and kickbacks for picking a particular overpriced vendor is probably greater.

A lot of folks unfortunately think open-source software is much more vulnerable than closed-source software because anyone can inspect it. The great irony of it, as everyone here knows, the opposite is actually often true.

Our society is not able to understand modern technology. Most people haven't even heard of concepts such as Open Source or Free Software. They have only been around for over 30 years, but ok.

I see people here are cheering for some proprietary app for Lemmy called Sync. It just makes me sad. I guess they don't want security on their devices.

Everything made by the government should be Free Software. Public money, public code: https://publiccode.eu

unfortunately people are in general only smart about one or two subjects, and morons about everything else. i include myself in this assessment.

This is true. It’s also why nuclear power plants aren’t a lot more common.

Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:

https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs

Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there's a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.

I absolutely agree. Vote counting & tallying machines are fine, but you always want that paper trail.

Brazil has changed to electronic voting since 1996 and faces none of these issues.

the only issue it faces is fascists trying to sow distrust.

Exactly. Every election you see a handful of right wingers claiming that the machines and/or code is unsafe and can be easily tampered with, but have absolutely nothing to back that up, and yet another election passes without anyone anywhere proving that our system is unsafe/a bad idea.

This Tom Scott video is terrible, should be renamed "why electronic voting is a bad idea (for fascists)

this video has 3 years.

3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can't trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can't trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.

This video is 3 years old, Brazil's electronic voting system is 27 years old and there hasn't been anyone proving that it is a bad idea, unsafe, tamperable or anything of the sort.

I like Tom but this video really irritates me. It just seems like he's pulling generic arguments out of his ass without any actual research.

Importantly, Open Source is not feasible as a safeguard because there would be no way of verifying that the voting machine is running a build from the public source.

Because there is too much money to be made in the business. Vendors are selected through a political process which is decided by what politicians benefit from the selection.

Don't kid yourself - the people screaming about rigged elections don't actually care about solving the problem. They know they lost and they are happy for the excuse to continue grandstanding.

If you had open-source voting machine code, you would get people on Fox News saying something along the lines of, "We've looked at the code, and we found that the machines are rigged to give extra votes to the Democrats." and all their viewers would believe them and start repeating that "fact" on social media forever and ever. At this point it is nothing short of naive to think that actual facts matter to these people.

Voting machines are the most utterly stupid thing ever created. Why don't you use papar ballots as other countries do?

We do, there are very few counties in the US that are actually fully digital (stupid idea IMHO). The majority are paper ballots which are scanned into the machine for fast counting. The original paper the voter filled out is then stored in case it needs to be checked against the machine count for accuracy.

Interesting that it takes so ridiculously long to count then, in Germany the votes are counted on paper by hand and they’re down within maximum 3 days.

It only started taking more than one day recently. My conspiracy theory is that it is so we have to watch the news for three days instead, which makes them a ton of money.

It’s because the government likes to corporatize everything. It should be open source and supported by several companies who all update the software and keep it bug free.

Just to be clear: People will argue bad actors whether it's paper or electronic. I have not seen a single election since I became able to vote where the votes were not disputed.

Assuming you're talking about America, before 2000 votes were never closely scrutinized or thought of as fraudulent. In Florida there was the hanging chads thing in 2000, and a fringe clings to the idea that there was chicanery in 2004, perhaps in Ohio. But the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections weren't seized on as needing to be "investigated," although the Republican candidate in 2016 declared that if he didn't win the forthcoming election, it'd be due to widespread fraud and he might not accept the result. In 2020, that came to pass, with a clear and validated loss and he didn't accept the result, infusing his supporters with the idea that there was massive fraud despite the lack of any evidence or verifiable documentation of it. Now, of course, we do have one party that seems perpetually trapped in a cycle of questioning all election outcomes that don't align with their political goals, and it seems likely to only get worse.

How do you prove that the software installed is the same software the source code of which is available to the public?

@rockslice addressed this in another comment - you use signing certificates to verify it's the correct code, which is a widely accepted method.

How do you know that what's open sourced is what's installed and running? Someone should verify it and then you'll have to trust that person as well.

This still adds another moving part to duping people. It's much, much easier to independently verify the software if it's open source.

Both open and closed source software share this problem, so this doesn't really answer the question.

I meant to say that open sourcing doesn't make it immediately trustworthy. You have to place the trust somewhere. If you can't trust that the open sourced code is what's running, it is effectively the same as running closed source software.

There are probably two reasons:

  1. It wouldn't change how the public thinks about them. People wouldn't understand how voting machines work, even if they were open source. Do you expect normal people to look at and understand code? Also people who have lost hope in democracy and want to believe that the election was a hoax will continue to do so anyway.

  2. It's probably more comfortable for the manufacturers of those machines to keep them closed source. Why would they show the world how they work? That would disclose potential flaws which is bad for their reputation. And it would make it easier for competition to emerge.

p.s. I agree that voting machines are bollocks.