Issue Position: Ensure Auditable Elections, Open Archives & Processes

Issue Position

Auditable Elections

Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and as such cannot ever be subject to "trade secrets". Without auditable software and hardware counting our already paper-trailed ballots, election auditors rely on statistical sampling to ensure the integrity of our elections.

The entire process of voting and indeed all government processes should not ever have trade secrets nor royalty-restricted patents. Copyrights preserve the intellectual effort of voting system writers on their own. In order to properly secure our election system, we must presume the Kerckhoffs-Shannon principle, "The enemy knows the system." Every serious security expert understands that a system can only be called secure if it cannot be broken even if enemy knows how the system works.

Seth will require that audits of all election software and hardware be open and accessible to the public and remove all secrecy policies and rules preventing such audits. Seth will also mandate that statistical sampling of our paper ballots provide at least 99% confidence in the computer tally of each election.

Open Archiving and Other Government Processes

It is important that all documents past and present be in open formats so that our archives do not get lost due to the use of proprietary, closed programming code that can disappear at any time and be shelved permanently under claims of trade secret. Ensuring we use open software, especially free software, means that our government processes are documented freely beyond that our document formats are published in open formats. In computer science, a program is the useful application of algorithms to data. Processes (what we call algorithms) are just as important as data in ensuring open government programs.

Once the proper free and open formats are chosen the main issue left is ensuring public privacy is respected and executive secrecy laws (such as employee review) are respected with proper rule-based protections. Using open and free software and hardware is the best way to ensure that the state is in compliance with its own policies regarding executive secrecy (such as the necessary secrecy of encryption keys) and vote process integrity. Without such openness we have no way of knowing whether or not the secrecy rules we do allow are being followed appropriately.

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