Open Voting Bill excludes Free Software?!

Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer and a couple more high ranking politicians last week issued a proposal for their 'Count Every Vote Act of 2005' that the Slashdot folks immediatly dubbed Open Voting Bill

Paragraph 9 of the act prohibites the use of undisclosed software in electronic voting maschines and that source code, object code, and executable would be made available for inspection upon request to any citizen.

This is a call for the use of open source software in the public sector that goes well along my analysis given in past entries in this blog. Closed Source Software simply cannot achive legitimacy in the public sector since there is no guarantee that the code contains no third party interests.

But what bugs me about this specific proposal is Paragraph 12, explicitly demanding: 1. that software manufactures have to conduct background checks on programmers and developers and 2. that the manufacturer shall ensure that any software used in connection with the voting system is not transferred over the Internet.

Should this Bill pass in its current form - which is highly unlikely - Free Software would effectively banned from becoming part of a voting system in the USA, since both demands are unattainable within the Free Software development model.

This poses a couple of problems that might affect legitimacy and efficiency of the voting system. Such a system protects the manufactures of the voting system from competition with Free Software that might deliver equal or better performance. It furthermore piles an unnecessary amount of layers between the software manufacturer and the citizen that might want to investigate the software counting his votes. No clear feedback modell for suggestions or contributions for citizens/programmers is given.

Last not least, the Bill does not touch the delicate question of the intellectual propery rights of the software used in the voting system. While the software might be open, there is no guarantee that the vendor applys for patents on it, which would put a method that is part of the public interest in private hands and also provide the possibility to charge an inadequate amount of money for it.