Lambdacurry

We need source-code whetting for India's e-voting machines


Rediff is breaking the story, about possible massive fraud in India’s e-voting machines. Apparently, the Chief Election Commissioner was stunned by a report by Omesh Saigal about the unreliability of the software running on the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs)

As I have previously pointed out, we need a reliable and open voting infrastructure and system in place to check possible voter fraud and election rigging (like Iran possibly). The U.S. elections have been marred by similar problems (popularised in the movie Recount ).

It is easy for contractors to get away with substandard software - not because I inherently allege our politicians are hand-in-glove, but because of a simple fact: a bureaucrat cannot understand source code. However there are hundreds of millions of citizens of this country, whose interests are not served by malicious voting systems and who are well qualified to understand these systems.

The entire voting apparatus source code should be made public - bureaucrats need to understand that every software will have bugs : that is the nature of programming. In order to save reputation about some bug that might be found in such systems, it is definitely not in our best interest to have such procedures shelved behind red tape.

We need to release this source code now.


Lambdacurry

We need source-code whetting for India's e-voting machines

Published

July 04, 2009

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