Plasterk: opening up source code important for electronic voting
Minister of the Interior Plasterk emphasizes the importance of opening up the source code of the electronic voting systems. This does not seem feasible for developers of the systems.
According to Minister Plasterk, systems for electronic voting and counting must comply with guarantees such as transparency, verifiability and integrity. “For anyone who wants this, it must be possible to verify how the systems work and it must be verifiable that the systems meet the requirements set for the systems. Public access to the source code is important in order to be able to have and maintain trust. in the systems,” the minister writes in response to questions from the standing committee for the Interior.
He also emphasizes that certification based on Common Criteria for IT security is necessary and that electronic voting systems cannot go through this if the source code is not available for all components. The question was what the consequences would be if the providers of such systems were unable to meet the requirement of opening up the source code. The minister does not answer that question immediately, but by presenting opening up as a hard requirement, it seems that the introduction will be in jeopardy if the condition cannot be met.
Two of the four companies that have volunteered to develop the electronic voting and counting systems do not consider making all source code publicly feasible. Atos reported this earlier in its Report Research on the Feasibility of a vote printer and vote counter. Based on the answers from these companies, the French IT consultancy itself concludes that it is not feasible for any of the four parties. The questions also discuss the limited number of parties that have come forward. According to Plasterk, Atos tried to interest other companies with calling rounds and the deadline was postponed, but this did not yield any more response.
Plasterk further reports that the costs for three tests with electronic voting and counting amount to between 100 and 130 million euros. This only concerns the costs of the supplier of the vote printer and vote counter. The costs continue to rise due to the supervision, monitoring and building up of expertise at municipalities. For the time being, it concerns tests on paper, to gain insight into the costs. A first test should involve five municipalities and 100 polling stations, a second 45 municipalities and 1800 polling stations and the last 150 municipalities and 3500 polling stations. In August, the Ministry of the Interior announced that the costs for a final implementation will amount to 260 to 365 million euros. This also concerned only investment costs.