Software glitches point to big election day problems

Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm

As we move toward the November mid-terms, we're beginning to a more detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a nation in less than a week: two major new reports from independent research groups detail the myriad security breaches, and procedural and technical problems in the 2006 Ohio primaries; stories from early voting in Texas indicate that the paperless DREs in at least two counties may have a partisan bias; another major new report from the University of Connecticut details a whole raft of security vulnerabilities in Diebold's optical scan voting machines; finally, BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.

I have maintained for a long time that that voting software should not be subject to the pressures of the marketplace. I am a capitalist. I own two software companies. I believe the private sector has much to offer the public. But how we vote and the way votes are counted in addition to the actual privilege of voting, represent the inner-workings of democracy. They should not be held hostage to domain experts, license agreements, financial incentives, consultants, trade secrets, copyright protection.

Elections in this country will always be suspect as long as legions of voters cast votes on machines they do not understand in the presence of pollwatchers who can't fix them, with each ballot counted by software that only a handful of engineers can see, and whose ultimate efficacy is in the hands of executives whose bonuses depend on the result.

Elections are too important to leave to even the perception of cronyism, hidden agendas and ecret development - all of which is completely normal in the business world. The development and maintenanace of all voting software should be managed by the government on behalf of the people as an open source project. Citizens need to see the code.