Voting Software

By Jack Ganssle

July 24, 2006

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It's an election year here in the United States, and the partisan bickering in Congress is now approaching unparalleled levels of hysteria. Somehow we citizens will have to bear with the accusations and silliness through November.

Then, of course, we exercise our Constitutional right to impose practical term limits (i.e., vote 'em out) or to preserve the status quo. In many districts those precious signals of democracy will be recorded and hastened to a (hopefully hardened) database by a variety of electronic voting machines. There's one thing we know will happen: the bickering will only increase as losers contend their constituents' desires were distorted by poor firmware in the machines, or by the lousy procedures used by election workers.

It's not just the machines themselves. Any part of the process controlled by software may be suspect. The ACM recently released a report about the software used to register voters. Here's a quote:

In light of recent events and legislation that have underscored the core importance of voting and of public confidence in our electoral system, one might conclude that all VRDs should be built and operated to the highest possible standards. While the highest standards of reliability, privacy, accountability, usability, and security are desirable, they may at times be impractical because of resulting expense or system response.

What--we're expected to intentionally build substandard code?

The assertion that correct code is slow ("system response") is a red herring designed to lull non-techies into accepting buggy code.

Two decades ago the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas burned with great loss of life, in part since there was no sprinkler system. The owners refused to shell out $200,000 for sprinklers, as the city fire codes of the time didn't require them. The fire and resulting lawsuits eventually cost them $200 million. Substandard construction, of hotels and of software, leads to expensive chaos.

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