Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State

daria42 writes "The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.' Huh?"

Re:Still wrong

[jimicus]

It's difficult to stuff a paper ballot box (which in most systems is never to be left unattended from when it's sealed to when the votes get counted) without it being fairly obvious.

OTOH, there are plenty of places to hide an electronic vote stuffer on most electronic systems and it's a often a lot harder to verify that nobody's tampered with them.

Re:Still wrong

[timmarhy]

paper votes can all be pyshically accounted for, and counted by a machine and then checked by multiple hand counters. thats the problem with electronic votes. how do you KNOW the button you pressed turned into the vote you asked for and can't be tampered with after the fact? while i'm sure there may be a solution like taking a hash of the vote based on it's time and result and storing it seperately to the vote itself, then checking these later to confirm they match. i'm not sure the public will be very comfortable with this concept for some time.

you can't track or verify your vote after you've cast it obviously - to suggest any voting system is flawed due to a lack of tracking flys in the face of the secret ballot and is for retards.

Re:Still wrong

[Yvanhoe]

Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?

Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.

Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.

It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.

does it matter ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to be honest. In the end I don't care one bit about what operating system the voting machine is on. Not at all. What I do care about is that it works and works well. Prove that to me and I would be fine with it running on OS/2

Re:A couple of things

[Zouden]

Australia has instant-runoff voting. Your proposal won't work here, nor is it necessary.

they are terrified of you having any say in your life.

With 95% voter turnout at each election, and four different parties currently in the Senate, I think our current method gives us plenty of say.

Re:What about the rest of it?

[jibjibjib]

The problem is that very few people, if any, have the time and expertise to verify every part of an e-voting system, and it's impossible for a person to see exactly what a chip is doing in real time to make sure the production system is behaving the same way the source says it should.

With paper-based voting, someone can look in the ballot box at the start of the day and see that it's empty. They can then watch each person put one ballot paper in, and they can watch them get taken out and counted. It is, and always will be, much more easily verifiable than any form of electronic voting.