Academics land e-vote research funding

The National Science Foundation plans to supply $7.5 million over the next five years for a project investigating techniques to create a more secure and trustworthy electronic voting system. Researchers said they will focus not only on hardware and programming--including cryptography and safeguards against tampering--but also legal and public policy questions involved in the transition.

Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin will lead the center, which will be called ACCURATE, short for A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections. Four other universities and the nonprofit research institute SRI International will also participate through the grant, part of the $36 million NSF awarded through its 2005 Cyber Trust program, earmarked for cybersecurity research.

[CNerd2025]

Open Source It!

Wired Magazine had an article a while back saying that we should Open Source the voting machines. Australia has Open Sourced their voting systems, and they have some of the best voting processes down under. The US should do the same. I'd be confident in my voting if I could view the source code to the machine. As to hackers? People have faked elections before. "Vote early and often" for is just one example. With OSS, there would be no "privacy" issues. All people would have easy access to find out what kind of information was used. Not a perfect solution, but a pretty damn good one.