| | |  Technology News | November 2009 
Electoral Software: What Is It?
 Guillermo Ramón Adames y Suari - PVNN
November 12, 2009
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the New York Times for publishing on October 29, part of my article concerning Electronic Voting under the heading "Trust, Antitrust and Your Vote". Unfortunately, due to space constraints, I could not extend my argument to the back bone of the problem under that heading: "Electoral Software: The open source voting systems."
Let me give an example that hopefully will throw some light to the reason of my stubborn insistence on open source voting code: Let us take a down to earth example: Most of us have access to a computer and most of our needs are to draft some text; some of us require to do some calculations; sometimes some databases.
How do we proceed? We turn on our computer and get some of the text processors available via the most popular Micorsoft suite. Likewise for calculations and database management. The "text" processing system allows us a number of possibilities: If we need further ideas such as presentations or mailings, we all know some nerd who would indicate us how to proceed when we require a "mailing" or "proofing" and you name it.
We all see what is happening on the screen with our document and the various modifications of it. You type an "a" and an "a" appears on the screen. You proof a word and a list of suggestions appears on a dialog box. And we finally print the document and everything is ok. The question here is "what happens behind what we are seeing on the screen"? That is the key issue in this article: Nobody knows! And if you know you will be sued by Microsoft as the source programme is not available to you or anybody else. The source programme has been reverse engineered and you have accessed to proprietary rights owned for by Microsoft only. You have violated security and intellectual property rights and procedures. If life is not bad to you, you will pay a fine.
But let's face it, this is only a document and many people learn how software by Microsoft operates and you can see immediately the results. When we do a calculation it is the very same procedure: 2+2 in an Excel worksheet gives you an answer of "4" if you filled the cases correctly and formatted the resulting cell accordingly. It is so obvious that it is not even questionable.
Unfortunately this simplicity is not the case with electoral software. Vote casting is secret so you don't really know how your vote is cast in the computer: where is it stored? do you know? If you do, you might have to pay another fine for the very same reasons as above. Is there a subroutine lost somewhere in the source code such that every "x" number of votes there must be a subtraction of one unit from candidate "y" to candidate "z" subtracting the corresponding vote from either candidate "k" or candidate "l" so that the final count agrees with the total number of votes casted?
This is simply a valid question with no answer. Many of us, are used to immediate computer results furnished by immediate response software. Many think that electoral software operates just the very same way. Big mistake! Many people are prepared to accept that whatever the computer indicates is the absolute truth. Just a stupid question: Why were many Americans so very unhappy with the 2004 elections? Too many (far too many) expressed their disagreement not only with the results but with the procedure also. What could be done? Go fight the "commercial property rights" of the voting machines and accept your new president whether you like him or not. Despite constitutional rights, there is no way of questioning the validity: whatever validity means in this context. Validity itself resides on commercial principles and intellectual property so dear to the US. Being a bit sarcastic, the US democracy depends on capitalistic rights of ownership of commercial software to even elect your presidents with no possible questioning of the methodology of "how" casting is done. The other extreme makes me think of the dark ages of the Soviet Regime: "The result is this".
I hope that the idea comes through: Computers have the system's way of calculating. If we do not know "how" the counting is done by the system, the results can give anything. Literally "anything" but software vendors will not risk their commercial empires nor show their methodology.
Alternatively if a panel of computer experts would indicate to the worldwide electorate that from the software side, once installed in the computer, the results were to be clear and precise according to needs and specifications. This uncertainty cloud would dissipate and give way to trust to the corresponding technology. But we're not there yet.
Guillermo Ramón Adames y Suari is a former electoral officer of the United Nations Organization. Contact him at gui.voting(at)gmail.com
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