German Elections Go Open Source

Get Behind the Mule writes "The Heise news ticker is reporting that the software used by the German government to handle the results of the Bundestag election (that's the national parliament) on September 22nd will be based on open source platforms. The system will be written in Java and deploy Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL, and is being developed by the Berlin software firm IVU (here's their press release), working with the Statisches Bundesamt (the federal statistics office). It's not clear from the announcements whether the source code of the application itself, and not just the servers it runs on, will be publically available. Nevertheless, one is reminded of the argument of Peruvian congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (seen recently in Slashdot) that open source software enables citizens of a democracy to see for themselves whether the work of government, such as elections, is conducted as it should be. All of the announcements are in German, so go fish. The software, as described in the announcements, will compute preliminary results (which are announced as soon as possible after the polls close), run plausibility checks, and determine the Bundestag membership as well as distribution of seats to the political parties. It will use web clients for entry of voting data, data import, presentation of results, and preparation of printed results. It will be based on a three-level architecture (apparently standard J2EE) and deploy Enterprise Java Beans."

Electionware

[adjensen]

An interesting concept, to be sure. Were that all of the political process was "open source".

And even though it is written in Java, they'll still likely have their election results sooner than we had ours in 2000 :-)

Hmmm

[NiftyNews]

"The software will...run plausibility checks"

Hopefully they mean on the votes. If you ran it on the candidate promises you'd have a 95% failure rate!

"Statisches" Bundesamt?

[mczak]

I guess that should be "Statistisches" Bundesamt. Being a governmental organization, they might not be very dynamic, but to call them "static" is a bit unfair...

MySQL

[mixbsd]

select * from politicians where clue > 0

Fewer Lines!

[White Roses]

Gee, if they had done it with .NET, they could have done it with fewer lines of code [gotdotnet.com]!

And left open security holes [newsfactor.com], and been vulnerable to virii [f-secure.com]. But, but, fewer lines of code!

And in other news...

[Ethelred Unraed]

In a strange result of the September 2002 general election in Germany caused by an unknown quirk in the software, Linus Torvalds was elected Chancellor, with Richard M. Stallman foreign minister. Thanks to Stallman's diplomatic skills, 104 countries declared war on the recently-renamed GNU/Germany. Film at 11.