Question

What do you agree in this?

I believe the biggest issue posed for democracy by using known vulnerable e-voting equipment is democracy itself. These machines could be exploited by either party in their favor, or by an outside hacktivist that supports either party in an election. If something like this were to be exploited, it essentially would throw out our constitutional right to vote, as our voice so to say could very well be tampered with and manipulated easily. I do not think we should even begin to consider using insecure methods tasked with something as important as an election, but here we are... I am not so sure that the voting systems should be based on an open source standard, as this is both a pro and con. The biggest pro is the same as the biggest con; anyone can view the source code. This is good, because white-hat programmers can identify vulnerabilities and submit a patch for them, but in the same hand, this is also bad because black-hat programmers can find vulnerabilities and craft an exploit against the found vulnerability for their own use. I think maybe at the least the framework for a voting system standard should be open source, but the voting system itself should be closed-source and handled by one or two trusted firms. This is also the way I would fix these systems, as well as developing a backup / alternative voting method for people that still do not trust e-voting systems for integrity.

Answer 1

It is totally agreeable that the voting system and it's source code must not be made open source because of the above fact explained in the question. The democratic system and it's voting process and procedures is the very essence of a democratic country and the voting rights and privileges of casting of votes without any tampering must be protected at any cost. A country spends millions of dollars in the whole democratic voting process which includes the research processes on the voting machine and their manufacturing. Moreover, every steps must be taken in order to ensure security of machines and gain trust of the citizens on these machines so as to avoid any unnecessary mishappenings after the voting result declaration.

In order to achieve such trust, ideas regarding security features must be collected from a congregation of all the white hat hackers. And there must be a few security analyst and white hat hackers be employed in the voting machine industry so as to to work on the security ideas and features provided as a suggestion by the citizens to make the voting machine robust and untamperable.

It is absolutely not advisable to make the the source code of voting machine an open source since it will allow other Black hat hackers and other countries who are willing to create unrest to analyse and find loopholes in the source code.

And at last it is highly advisable for any country to go on with a system of voting which is totally agreed upon among citizens until a hack proof and a robust e voting machine come into existence.