Open (Source) Elections
A radical new voting machine shows us what it’s made of.
With summer behind us, all thoughts are turning to voting season. From a tech perspective, there’s a lot to discuss, especially deepfake ads and videos. Whether those ads will sway people’s decisions at the voting booth is another question. This week, I want to look at the voting booths themselves, and how open-source software could change the game.
In last week’s newsletter, I cast my vote for open-source software, which was facing potential limitations in California ahead of last Thursday’s vote. In short, I believe that these transparent, publicly accessible systems allow for more trust. You can see it in the messaging app Signal, a truly private network that provides end-to-end encryption of messages, voice and video calls that even the network can’t access. (More on how they protect users’ data on this episode of the podcast.) Where does open source come in? Signal publishes all their code.
Sure, you can modify it to make it do whatever you want for your own personal use, but way more importantly, you can audit it to verify that it does everything it says it’s going to do. If you don’t believe them, you can always compile it yourself (or find a data nerd) and run it. You can make sure that the algorithms that are keeping your data secure are actually doing so. (Fellow nerds can dive into Signal’s protocol here.) In this situation, open source is a huge part of being trustworthy.
Okay, so what does this have to do with the presidential election? If you remember, a lot of the 2020 election was mired in people attacking the integrity of voting machines. They’re hard to audit, and recounts are time-consuming and politically fraught. There’s just not a lot of trust in the voting machines. And why should there be? Around 90% of the voting technology market is controlled by three private companies, which don’t have to disclose how their proprietary systems operate or who their investors are.
But there’s a scrappy new player on the field, and it’s powered by open source. VotingWorks is the only nonprofit voting system vendor in the U.S. If you go to their site, you’ll see who their major donors are (not a Koch or Soros among them). And if you go to the open source platform GitHub, you’ll see all of their source code. They believe that democracy is too important for secretive machinery, and hope that their transparent process and product can help rebuild trust in voting.
VotingWorks machines are currently used in 14 counties in Mississippi, but there has been interest from states like New Hampshire, which now uses them in five towns. Ten states use the nonprofit’s open-source audit software, Arlo. (Georgia used it during the 2020 hand-count audit.) The move toward transparency is gaining momentum: Microsoft recently piloted open source voting software, at least six states have passed bills allowing or requiring open-source voting technology have passed, and there is a federal bill circulating that would study this option.
Do the majority of voters a) know what open source is, and b) care if it’s being used? I believe that if they knew the whole story, they would. Let’s join this call for transparency at the moment it matters most.
Worth the Read
Anthropic announced that it has added system prompts to Claude.ai that will provide up-to-date info at the start of every conversation. So far, the response has been good.
Which story did novelist Curtis Sittenfeld write, and which is AI? Listen (or read) here.