Rewiring the Voting Booth
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Paradosis blogs about a libertarian party unafraid of religious language in the public square: the Constitution Party. I’m still deciding what I think about this party. I nursed at the breast of evangelical fundamentalism, so a lot of what they have to say resonates on a very primal level, even if it also makes me a little nervous.
However, this line in their party platform nearly had me rolling on the floor:
In order to avoid election fraud, we urge an end to electronic or mechanical voting processes and a return to the manual counting process overseen by, and accountable to, voters resident in each precinct where the votes are cast.
Yet a few lines earlier, they explicit advocate technological advancement in the defense department. Apparently, their commitment to technology is susceptible of an irrational inconsistency. I wonder what else might be?
Perhaps their double emphasis on a return to Constitutional government and specifically Christian religious values.
However, perhaps I should not be so quick to dismiss the point. I just read on Raphael’s blog a post on using open source software for voting mechanisms.
The same is true of both Open Source and “Professional” software as well: Diebold or Microsoft or even Apple — and now open source coders. Do you want any or all of them knowing your vote?
Of course not. Only open source software allows anyone who can read the code to see whether any foolishness is being done. With closed source, the uncompiled source code is a trade secret. Frankly, closed source code in voting apparati is much, much scarier. If Microsoft secreted your vote away, you might never know. If an open source project did, it would be obvious. “Oh, look, there’s a backdoor here.” Snip, snip; recompile. Bingo, no backdoor.
Being able to read the code, by the way, does not automatically mean that the content communicated — one’s vote, in this case — is insecure or open for anyone to see. That would be a design decision.
…the reality is that many of the people who bring you Open Source also bring you Blaster and Sasser. If you don’t trust the evil corporations… why do you trust the hackers? Let’s be honest: many corps are perceived (rightly or not) as having right-wing ideologies in place and thus are perceived to be secretly running things to the right. OK, let’s be honest, many hackers, coders and geeks are perceived (rightly or not) as having left-wing ideologies in place. Can they be trusted either?
OK, there are a lot of misconceptions to disentangle here. First, the foundational misconception in operation is the identification of hacker with cracker. See ESR’s extended research and reflections on the hacker subculture. Hackers did not bring you Blaster and Sasser. Crackers and script kiddies did. Hackers brought you such things as the internet, the world wide web, Unix and Linux (the OS used for many web and mail servers), FreeBSD (the basis for Apple OS X), KHTML (the basis of Apple’s Safari browser), Mozilla Firefox (one of the most secure browsers on the web), and the software used for effects in The Lord of the Rings and Pixar Studios films. The list could go on forever. Other hackers will be more than happy to add to it, I’m sure.
The other misconception is that hackers lean to the left. On a one-dimensional political graph, that may appear to be the case. However, on a two-dimensional political graph, many hackers have very libertarian values. They lean to the left on issues of freedom, but they are often very committed to Constitutional government. Given the crypto-fascism and crypto-imperialism of the post-bellum federal government, this can often be confused with anarchism. Some hackers really are anarchists, but I find that position rare.
Frankly, knowing so many hackers, I am far more comfortable with them than with any politician.