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From: jos boersema on 27 Dec 2009 03:58
Hi,

I wrote the following voting program: http://www.socialism.nl/~joshb/sede
(which was featured in Linux-Magazine in 'Brave GNU World,' we also
tested that program 'in real life' with a political party and it worked
fine (we did some 15 votes on one ballot)).

The program is quite big (25,000 lines) and has many features (and many
features it doesn't yet have...). The program is very flexible &
modular, and follows Unix philosophy of modularization, specialization
(do only one task but do it well), and easy cooperation with other
programs (clear-tekst, call other progs -- for example 'sede - secure
democracy' does not do its own encryption, it calls programs from a
user defined command line).

Anyway: I heard Debian has its own voting system, which is ad-hoc and
not a formal program/package. This sede program does not yet feature
non-anonymous voting, but it should be easy to make that happen. I'm
currently not maintaining it anymore because I think it's time for
someone else to do something for online democracy (would make it more
democratic too.)

Maybe it could be considdered by Debian to use this voting program sede,
because that way you'd have a serious program doing it, and the wider
world could benefit from the work getting done on that voting system
itself. Being a voting system, it can have positive implications for the
wider world. Many false preconceptions exist on online voting, also
within the 'Linux community.' Online voting as done by sede works, but
as a system it has its own strengths and weaknesses. One weakness is for
example the danger of vote-buying, because a voter can prove he/she has
voted a vote. For some people that makes the system not so good for
certain votes, but that doesn't mean it can't work or isn't useful.
Simply a matter of knowing what you are doing.

best regards,
jos boersema
--
http://www.socialism.nl (Another kind of socialism.)
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