E-voting systems are currently based on commercial systems which use proprietary source code. Systems that rely on publicly available source code which can be fully accessed by all interested persons are not (yet) in use. The main challenge with proprietary software is the fact, that vendors are usually not willing to provide access to the source code. However, there is a growing demand – by EMBs, voters and civil society organizations – that source code may be available for public inspection. Currently these demands are either not being met or if they are, the insight is limited in time and scope. Vendors maintain that making the source code fully available is not possible for security reasons. They fear that hackers would make use of the source code in order to find weaknesses that allow them to intrude the system. Also there might be commercial reasons for not making the source code publicly available. On the other hand, advocates of open source maintain that the publishing of the code ensures its quality. Not only could weaknesses be identified, but solutions would be developed very quickly.
It should be noted that, even if source codes were made fully accessible, this would not mean that an e-voting system is fully understandable. Apart from the source code, there are other components (operating system, hardware etc.) that are entailed in an e-voting system.
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