After all the doubts and controversy caused by the last two United States presidential elections, being able to trust election results is one of the most heartfelt needs of the Western world. This need depends on the fact that if the democratic legitimacy of who wins the election is not certain, a political group may not acknowledge electoral defeat, and this could lead to serious public order problems.

In order not to run these risks western style democracies must be able to count on electoral systems that are not only honest and reliable, but are also considered to be so, and thus accepted by public opinion.

When paper ballots were being used and elections were carried out under the watchful eye of public opinion there were never any well grounded doubts about election results and nobody ever seriously questioned the democratic legitimacy of those elected.

However, things changed with the advent of the electronic vote. In fact, for citizens, the lack of transparency of the electronic voting mechanism brought about the loss of "democratic monitoring" over the elections, causing a large part of public opinion to be sceptical about, or even openly against, electronic voting.

In this day and age electronic voting is a hope, and at the same time a nightmare. It is a hope for those who imagine and invoke it as a natural application of computing, as if it were a normal business transaction. It is a nightmare for those who maintain that as with electronic voting there is no paper back-up, which is a physical proof of the vote expressed, it is possible and very easy to manipulate election results without leaving any traces. Detractors of electronic voting see their legitimate fears amplified by the fact that there are few producers of electronic voting apparatuses and they mainly use proprietary software protected by trade secret and therefore impossible for anyone to control.

The assignment of political power arouses enormous economic and political interests, also at strategic and international levels, therefore, no voting system, neither paper nor electronic, can be based on trust. In fact, citizens/voters cannot, and must not, blindly trust the doings of state or government bodies, or of private companies to which the government farm out voting services.

The nightmare of any sincere democrat is that there could be a short circuit between the large electronic voting industry (hardware and software) and economic-political power. In fact one could certainly hypothesize on the possibility that let's say "free and easy" industrialists or politicians could be tempted by the opportunity to mould a voting system whose results are not verifiable to suit their own purposes.

That opposition to electronic voting is not just Luddism is demonstrated by the fact that although computing has been used for years in public administration in the whole of the western world, electronic voting is used in only a few countries, and every electronic election is followed by disputes and doubts about the election results.

Up to now the computing business has sought to make public opinion accept electronic voting apparatuses by improving the computing security systems such as the cryptography of data and transmission. However, a large proportion of public opinion, especially the more competent in the field, is still indifferent to and afraid of the electronic vote.

Such opposition is certainly not unmotivated because we physical people are not equipped to verify what goes on inside electronic apparatus, therefore we consider any computer that has not been programmed by ourselves as a "black box" and the only way we can really verify its doings is to know the ingoing data and compare the expected result with the actual result. Unfortunately in elections the ingoing data is unknown (as the votes are secret) and so is the expected result that should be compared with that produced by the voting procedure.

The only way for the public to be able to control the black box is to use open source software, which allows public opinion, or at least the more technically competent portion of it, to verify that the sources of the programmes used in the voting procedures are free from any tricks or bugs.

The use of Open Source software in electronic voting has been suggested for years, but it has always come up against the practical impossibility of verifying that the actual programme being run in all polling stations during the voting procedure is really the one originating from the compiling of the verified Open Source sources. The problem is not only related to the voting software because rigged alterations to the results could also derive from fraudulent modifications of compilers, operating systems, system libraries, interfaces and other high level applications.

ClearSoftware addresses all the above points in a simple, cheap and verifiable way.

Another reason for serious risk, and legitimately suspect from public opinion's point of view, is the connection between voting computers and the central system that receive the data in order to subsequently produce the aggregate results. It is useless to say that any datum, especially an anonymous one such as a vote, can be artfully altered during transmission on any network. That is without considering that the network could be used for acts of hacking aimed at sabotaging the elections.

The paper voting system also has some critical points such as blank ballots, that can be unlawfully transformed into valid votes, or "contestable" ballots, that can be wrongly interpreted, or valid ballots that are unlawfully transformed into "null votes". These problems are resolved in a procedural way thanks to the democratic control carried out by the polling station staff and party-list representatives, but in cases where such control is not effective, paper election results may not necessarily be in accordance with voters' wishes.

ClearVoting addresses all the above points in a simple, cheap and verifiable way.