Documentaries such as "Recount" and "Hacking Democracy" have made me sick to my stomach - and for a while now I've been questioning the fundamentals of the 'Democracy' that we have been shoving down other countries' throats all these years.
I for one am thrilled to hear about something like this. I think it is long overdue and it has a number of benefits:
1) will save taxpayers money in the long term
2) will create a platform that many developers can review and audit, thus helping improve security and preventing fraud
3) will create a de-facto standard for how we vote, and hopefully over time become used by more and more counties
4) will provide a better level of technology so even poorer counties can (hopefully) upgrade to a high tech and more accurate voting system
Did it really just say they want to do it in Rails? Never heard of anyone proving the safety of a Rails app.
For that matter, not sure what language they should write it in. Maybe Standard ML?
All I know is that Rails is awesome for building a lot of cool stuff very quickly - but there are better solutions for building a single thing that is indestructible.
There's lots of different software involved here. They said "the election management components are built with Ruby on Rails".
I don't want to get into an argument about the security of the Rails framework specifically - as an active developer I know there have been several issues - but I doubt anyone can guarantee that anything will be indestructible forever.
If you felt strongly about it and wanted to rewrite that portion of their codebase in another language and framework, I'm sure they would accept your code contribution.
I see lots of discussion of process on the OSDV site and wiki, but nothing about vote verification. There's pedestrian validation of hardware and software in machines, but no cryptographic method for voters to check that their vote was included in the final tally, in a David Chaum sense.
Without tamper-resistant algorithms, this is just Diebold++.
I for one am thrilled to hear about something like this. I think it is long overdue and it has a number of benefits:
1) will save taxpayers money in the long term
2) will create a platform that many developers can review and audit, thus helping improve security and preventing fraud
3) will create a de-facto standard for how we vote, and hopefully over time become used by more and more counties
4) will provide a better level of technology so even poorer counties can (hopefully) upgrade to a high tech and more accurate voting system