Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

It won't surprise anyone that I'm not a great fan of electronic voting. I think most people who know anything about software share my reluctance to trust it for something as important as the democratic process.

For some reason, the government only releases the voting software after the elections. In other words, if the software is flawed in a way that influences the results of the elections, the problem can only be "fixed" by calling new elections. Inevitably, that means the problem won't be fixed. Ever.

Earlier today, I downloaded the "source codes" [sic] of the software used for the 2007 elections. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find a single line of code in the Zip archive yet. The archive contains a large number of binary files and even something that looks like a bootloader.

There also appears to be some documentation in the archive. Some of the documentation is in PDF files, but there are also some Microsoft "Word" files which I can't read.

Why does the government go through all this trouble to hide the source code of this important software? Do they assume citizens don't care? I'm a bit grumpy about this.