Today I testified at a hearing entitled, "Open Source Software – Does It Have A Place In California’s Electoral System?" held by the California State Senate Committee on Elections, Reapportionment and the Constitution chaired by Senator Debra Bowen. It went well and I think we were effective in communicating that open source is only one aspect of voting system transparency. We also stressed that there are many open questions with open source and disclosed source in the voting systems area and any sudden unilateral moves to mandate disclosed source code or open source licenses would be ill-advised. (Also see: "California Holds Hearing on Open Source Software in Election Systems" by Wayne Hanson at GovTech)
I'll talk a bit more about it below...
Follow up:
The first panel was meant to be essentially a primer on open source issues and business models. Panelists were:
- Andrew Aitken, Founder and Managing Partner, Olliance Group
- Clark Kelso, CIO of the State of California
- Michael Evans, Vice President, Corporate Development, Red Hat
- David Hill, Golden Gate University
Our panel consisted of:
- Peter Neumann, SRI
- Deirdre Mulligan, UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall)
- Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley School of Information
Peter mostly talked from his written testimony ("The Relative Merits of Openness in Voting Systems" (PDF)) and was lucid as ever; his testimony is a fun must-read. He talked about the beginnings of SE Linux in the 1970s and explained the illusion of security through obscurity with particular candor.
Deirdre talked about what we've been calling the enclosure of transparency over the history of voting in the U.S. as well as ways to increase transparency and how open and disclosed source do or don't align with the goals of the State.
In my testimony, I talked about three things: barriers to the use of open source software in elections, what business models used right now in other areas of open source may or may not easily translate to the voting systems market and the Australian experience with the eVACS voting system (which was procured and delivered under the GNU GPL but did not use open source development methods). Deirdre and my joint testimony is available here.
The last panel was supposed to be a vendor panel but none of them showed. Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI) and Hart Intercivic both declined to attend while Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software never answered the invitation to attend. Senator Bowen even said that if they refused to attend, she'd have to subpoena them to get them to testify. The ITAA's Election Technology Council did release a decent statement that will be posted eventually as well.
We had to leave early, during the public comment and I was disappointed that we couldn't see more. Kim Alexander (friend and president of CVF), Jerry Berkman, Ron Crane, Jim March, Jim Sobel and Alan Dechert were all lined up to make remarks but we had to leave during Jerry's comments.
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