Open source e-voting projects

There have been a number of efforts to write open source voting code. Most exist purely in software form, but three systems are used or aim to be used in actual elections: Australia's eVACS, The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) and Open Voting Solutions (OVS).

Among international efforts,The following nations have either posted or claim to have posted voting system software in publicly-accessible forums or to select organizations: Argentina, Venezuela, Estonia and Kazakhstan. See: ``Publicación de Software y Documentación'', available (in Spanish) here: https://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/dgelec/index.php?module=pruebaPiloto&file=publicacion, See: ``Auditorías en Venezuela garantizan la integridad del voto'', available (in Spanish) at: https://www.smartmatic.com/noticias_077_2005-18.htm, See (in Estonian): https://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf and documentation/software at: https://www.vvk.ee/elektr/dokumendid.htm, Kazakhstan claims to allow review of the source code used to power their voting systems; it is hard to find. The Kazakh elections website (in Cyrillic): https://election.kz/. The Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly commissioned an electronic voting system in 2000 to be used in the 2001 assembly election.Clive Boughton and Carol Boughton, ``Credible Election Software -- eVACS^TM'', white paper on file with author (2005). The winning bid, from an Australian firm called Software Improvements, was chosen on the grounds of superior project and quality management as well as increased transparency, as their solution would be freely licensed under the GNU GPL license. Software Improvements designed eVACS to be used on regular PCs that were used during the rest of the year for other purposes.

Aside from the fact that it was the first officially commissioned open source voting system, there are other interesting aspects of the eVACs system. First, while being a GPL'd product, it was not a product of an open source development model; software engineers employed by Software Improvements conducted all development in a highly controlled contribution environment. In fact, when a bug was discovered in the code by outside researchers and brought to the attention of the vendor firm, they developed their own internal fix instead of accepting the outside researchers' fix.Email interview with Carol Boughton of Software Improvements Pty Ltd. (on file with author). Second, the GPL was abandoned for the latest version of the system due to concerns of inadequate Australian legal footingFor example, under §68(1) of Australia's Trade Practices Act of 1974, a disclaimer of warranty is void if it does not follow the particular conventions and wording of the Act. See: Fitzgerald, B., And Bassett, G. Legal issues relating to free and open source software. Essays in Technology Policy and Law (Queensland University of Technology School of Law) 1 (2003). as well as a desire of the firm to protect their intellectual property.Software Improvements stated two concerns with releasing code that they've written under the GPL: first, that they would loose any trade secrecy embodied in the code and second, that another firm could use software that they've developed to compete against them. However, ACT Electoral Commissioner Philip Greene has said that any future work will have to support the same level of access as what Software Improvements provided with eVACS.Email interview with Philip Greene of the ACT electoral commission. (on file with author). Software Improvements is currently in the process of designing a licensing model that would simultaneously solve their concerns while allowing third-party examination and evaluation of the code.

Two groups, The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) and Open Voting Solutions (OVS) have emerged in the U.S. that aim to design or build voting systems with software source code distributed under an open source license. OVS is very new and seems still in the coordination phase of their work but has as its mission to ``develop open public specification based voting systems.'' The OVC, a loose-knit group of activists, information technology professionals and academics, produced a prototype system in 2003 that consisted of demonstration software that ran on commodity computers running the Linux operating system. The OVC's mission now appears to have shifted toward advocacy for the use of open source code in electronic voting systems and away from the production of an electronic voting system.

Given the interest in electronic voting systems powered by open source software it is notable that no working models have fully matured in the current market. I discuss some of the potential reasons for this in Section  below. While the verdict is certainly not in on whether the market will independently yield open source powered voting systems, it might now be appropriate to think about other ways of incentivizing open source development so that groups like the OVC can attract the talent needed to produce marketable products. We discuss some possible ideas for this in Section .