Ariel’s Playground & Toy Factory

Smartmatic needs to bare open the source code of the computerized election system it supplies the Philippine Commission on Election (COMELEC) for transparency and to allay fears that the 2010 election can be rigged.

There’s no justification for keeping it a secret. The more secret it becomes, the more mysterious how it will process the vote counting. The more mysterious it becomes, the more suspicious will the outcome of elections be. This will raise more doubts in the integrity of the election.

NO, we don’t want to go back to the manual process and YES, we really need to computerized the election to speed up the process and to lessen “human intervention.” The more time it takes to process/count the results and the more chance for “human intervention,” the more the opportunity for cheaters to make the election process a circus, a mockery of our democracy.

In the manual system (ideally of course), the counting up to canvassing is held in front of watchers and the public to show transparency of the process. With the computerized election, this method has been replaced by the machines with less human intervention making it less prone to cheating. But wait, isn’t the source code also done by humans prone to error and there’s the chance that it might have bugs or can be rigged. Therefore, to remove this suspicion / doubt, the source code should be open.

I think the issue of intellectual property here is no longer important, opening the source code does not mean violation of IPR or copyright since violation of copyright happens only if it is copied and used illegally by others. And if it does happens, they still have the law that they can apply to prosecute violators. But this is not the current problem and it is not the paramount interest of the nation. Copyright laws or the application of other laws will become useless if we will have an unstable government as a result of a failed rigged election.

Then there’s the issue of security. This “making secret of the source code for security purposes” is an example of “Security by Obscurity” which time and again has been proven to be a flawed method for securing software. The rising popularity of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its increasing used in both government, scientific institutions and commercial enterprises has proven that the more open a source code is, the more it becomes stable and secured because the more people examines and audits the code the lesser the bugs.

[Got to go, will continue posting my thoughts on this issue later. If you have reactions both for or against this opinion, please post your comments.]