Cathal Mc Ginley cathalmcginley@eircom.net writes:
Is anyone at IFSO doing anything on the e-voting campaign at the moment?
Aidan Delaney is(?) working on this.
Is there still a desire for us to give the free software angle [...] 'Electronic voting must not use secret software'.
1. Voting *must* be verifiable (paper audit trail) 2. The totaling system *should* be transperant
(Both are missing from the planned system. Lesser issues exist too.)
Without #1, we don't know if we live in a democracy or not.
On #2, the source code *should* be viewable. There is no legitimate reason for an honest government to hide the instructions that will be used to total the votes - but this is not fundamental to democracy.
As a liberty-in-software group, I think we're in a good position to comment on #2 - but I think we'd have to be careful not to push #1 out of politicians heads.
"Dear Ms. Politician, Regarding the use of electronic voting equipment, IFSO seconds the proposal of [the good e-voting group], but we would also like to comment on the non-transperancy of the voting software .. yakkity yakkity...."
If you can work on this, you could talk to Aidan or write your own letter (which could be sent personally or as IFSO (after committee review (or something))).
Don't worry about who the target is. That can be figured out during or after the letter writing process - if you put off writing the letter it may never happen. The target will be someone non-technical, a mail to the e-voting list (@stdlib.net I think) will probably get the answer.