{"id":34219,"date":"2009-10-28T09:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091027\/1742576699.shtml"},"modified":"2009-10-28T09:50:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-28T13:50:00","slug":"surprise-sequoia-to-open-source-evoting-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/34219","title":{"rendered":"Surprise: Sequoia To Open Source Evoting Code"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sequoia Voting Systems had been one of the “big three” e-voting providers, along with Diebold (Premiere) and ES&S. All three companies were notorious for massive amounts of secrecy and many, many, many reports of faulty machines with weak security<\/a>. Sequoia’s biggest problem — which showed up in election<\/a> after election<\/a> after election<\/a> after election<\/a> — was that it seemed to count the votes differently every time. That seems like a rather big flaw. The company also threatened computer security expert Ed Felten<\/a> after the State of New Jersey asked him to look at Sequoia’s code.<\/p>\n

Just last week there were reports that Sequoia had accidentally<\/a> revealed some of its source code — but this week Sequoia has surprised a lot of people by announcing plans for a new e-voting system which will have open source e-voting software included<\/a>. The code will be released to the public next month.<\/p>\n

This is definitely a big (and surprising) step forward. The Wired link above tries to speculate why — but I’d argue the most obvious reason (not mentioned in that article) is that Sequoia’s two largest competitors, ES&S and Diebold\/Premiere merged last month<\/a>, suddenly making Sequoia a much smaller player in the space (I believe it was already the number three player…). Going open source isn’t just a way to improve its code and improve trust in the machines, but also a way to stand out against a much larger competitor.<\/p>\n

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Sequoia Voting Systems had been one of the “big three” e-voting providers, along with Diebold (Premiere) and ES&S. All three companies were notorious for massive amounts of secrecy and many, many, many reports of faulty machines with weak security. Sequoia’s biggest problem — which showed up in election after election after election after election — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}