Anyone Familiar With This Open-Source Voting System In Australia?

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So what the government did was to put out a call for proposals to fix the system. Of the proposals that came in, exactly one was an open-source plan. Phillip Green, the electoral commissioner for the territory involved, said it was an easy choice to go with the open-source plan. He'd been observing the American experiments with e-voting, you see, and he had a good idea of what to avoid. "We were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see," he said. "We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone—particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large—could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing." Thus: open source.

Despite the obvious good sense of Green's choice, the government went ahead with it. From start to finish, the project was posted on the Web for all to see. Also, an independent verification and validation company was hired to audit every line of code. Mistakes got spotted and corrected. And the whole project, from concept to product, took just six months and cost $125,000.

The eVACS system is not terribly sophisticated. Voters get a bar code to swipe over a reader, and that lets them cast a vote. It doesn't record any personal info; the validation that the voter is the voter happens in the usual low-tech way prior to handing out the vote-enabling bar code, I guess. The voter then uses an on-screen ballot, and the results are sent securely to a local server that burns two identical discs of results, along with digital signatures. These get delivered independently to a central polling place and counted (electronically).

The system doesn't include a voter-verifiable receipt, and the designers admit that this needs to be added. The receipt is a printout from the machine, without which there is no paper audit trail of the vote, which is necessary to assure voters that their vote got counted, as well as being needed in case of a recount. But that's easy enough to add, and New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a bill in the U.S. House that would make such receipts mandatory in all American e-voting systems.

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