Voting: Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)
First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here’s some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: ‘the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).’
And this one:
‘Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,’ Jones said. ‘We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.’
He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.
This letter to LWN notes: ‘You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by ‘big name’ open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)’, and links to the code’s CVS repository!
It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here’s the product brochure.
This posting to iRights gives a few more details.
It all looks like an excellent job all ’round, as far as I can see.