The following written testimony was submiitted for the public hearing of the Election Subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration on March 15, 2007.

In my testimony today, I will address source code disclosure, the problems it is intended to solve, and its benefits and risks. There are peculiarities in the voting system market and regulatory process that complicate the transition to the disclosure of the voting system source code. While these peculiarities require that such a transition be carefully considered and managed, it is a transition that I view as important for sound elections, for three reasons: (1) security and reliability; (2) public confidence and transparency; and (3) oversight and accountability.

A primer on source code and its the role in elections

What is source code? Source code is the human-readable representation of the instructions that control the operation of a computer. Computers are composed of hardware (the physical devices themselves) and software (which controls the operation of the hardware). The software instructs the computer how to operate; without software, the computer is useless. Source code is the human readable form in which software is written by computer programmers. Source code is usually written in a programming language that is arcane and incomprehensible to non-specialists but, to a computer programmer, the source code is the master blueprint that reveals and determines how the machine will behave.

Source code could be compared to a recipe: just as a cook follows the instructions in a recipe step-by-step, so a computer executes the sequence of instructions found in the software source code. This is a reasonable analogy, but it is also imperfect. While a good cook will use her discretion and common sense in following a recipe, a computer follows the instructions in the source code in a mechanical and unfailingly literal way; thus, while errors in a recipe might be noticed and corrected by the cook, errors in source code can be disastrous, because the code is executed by the computer exactly as written, whether that was what the programmer intended or not. Also, computer software is vastly more complex than most recipes: while a typical recipe may contain perhaps a dozen steps and fits onto a single 3x5” index card, computer source code often contains hundreds of thousands of steps which, if printed, would fill up thousands of single-spaced 8.5x11” sheets of paper.

• Diane Golden - Consortium of Citizens with Disabilities
• Kelly Pierce - Disability Access Voter, Working Group Cook County
• Eric Clark - Mississippi Secretary of State
• Ted Selker - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Brit Williams, Kennesaw State University

The second panel will address software disclosure and will include the following witnesses:

• David Wagner - UC Berkeley, ACCURATE
• Matt Zimmerman - Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Brian Behlendorf - Collab.net, Apache Software Foundation
• Hugh Gallagher, Election System Acquisition and Management Services

The hearing is open to the public.

This article was posted on Prefessor Felten's blog Freedom to Tinker and is reposted here with permission of the author.

After a long fight, we have reached the point where a major e-voting reform bill has a chance to become U.S. law. I'm referring to HR 811, sponsored by my Congressman, Rush Holt, and co-sponsored by many others. After reading the bill carefully, and discussing with students and colleagues the arguments of its supporters and critics, I am convinced that it is a very good bill that deserves our support.

The main provisions of the bill would require e-voting technologies to have a paper ballot that is (a) voter-verified, (b) privacy-preserving, and (c) durable. Paper ballots would be hand-recounted, and compared to the electronic count, at randomly-selected precincts after every election.

The most important decision in writing such a bill is which technologies should be categorically banned. The bill would allow (properly designed) optical scan systems, touch-screen systems with a suitable paper trail, and all-paper systems. Paperless touchscreens and lever machines would be banned.

I testified this week in a hearing of the US House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government in Washington DC. Here is my written testimony. The hearing was very interesting. I think we've come a long way from the days when members of Congress had no idea what was going on with respect to e-voting security. The questions, for the most part were intelligent, well researched, and to the point. Many of the questions were directed at another witness, Donetta Davidson, who is Chairwoman of the Election Assistance Commission. The Members grilled her about the lack of accountability of the EAC after they provide money to the states. They also asked for some third party research reports that the EAC has kept confidential.

It turns out that the ranking member of the subcommittee is from Diebold's home district. So, predictably, he tried to ask me challenging questions that sounded as though they were written by Diebold. "Voters love these machines, so why am I arguing against them?" I pointed out that none of my complaints against the DREs have to do with whether or not the voters like them. He also asked me why I would want to go back to an error-prone system such as op-scan when Diebold DREs in Maryland virtually eliminated voter error. I explained to him that modern optical scanners in precincts can provide the same level of overvote and undervote detection. He seemed to run out of steam after that.

The following opening statement was delivered at the Judiciary hearing “Protecting the Right to Vote: Election Deception and Irregularities in Recent Federal Elections” by Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) on March 7, 2007.

There is no more important issue that comes before this committee, this congress, or this nation that protecting the right to vote. Our democracy is premised on the notion of one person, one vote. It is the keystone right of our nation, and without it, all of the other rights and priveleges of our people would quickly become meaningless.

Protecting this precious right does not come easily or cheaply. In a very real sense, we fought a war of Independence with England over our people’s right to vote, and the most basic reform that grew out of the Civil War was the Fifteenth’s Amendment’s protection of the right to vote. Even than, it was not until we passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that we began to give true meaning to that right.

There is a constant ebb and flow in our democracy over this right. We have endured the abuses of Tamany Hall, and the Pendergast and Daley Machines. We survived the debacle of Florida in 2000. In each case we with the best of intentions have enacted reforms.