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For most of the technology governments use, they are reliant on off-the-shelf hardware and software. Only the military has the budget to design solutions from s
by vinceguidry 11y ago
For most of the technology governments use, they are reliant on off-the-shelf hardware and software. Only the military has the budget to design solutions from scratch. Police equipment has traditionally been either ancient, or repurposed military hardware, only recently have budget blown up to where it's profitable for companies to design products specifically for police departments.
The private sector literally doesn't have any use, at all, for voting machines. The problem they solve never arises in modern life. So there's no commercial solution available to repurpose. Add that to the fact that election boards are always hideously underfunded and understaffed, there's no one out there to hold the contractors' feet to the fire.
Really, state and local election boards need to just go back to the older systems, but there's nobody making them do it, and you will sound like a Negative Nancy trying to take away all their fancy new kit.
What really needs to happen is for POTUS to make it an issue. With one swipe of his pen he could issue an executive order to throw federal money at a new department whose job is to maintain a body of standards for electronic voting machines and mandate that all new machines have to adopt on a certain time table. They probably won't be secure, but it'll be the department's job to respond to reported vulnerabilities and ensure that they get fixed.
- BurningFrog 11y agoHow much would it cost to produce a decent secure voting machine design? No more than a few tens of millions, right? Maybe a few of the tech billionaires that read HN could pass around a hat and get this done? "Saved American democracy" would be a good legacy for anyone!
- ianlevesque 11y agoCongratulations you've rediscovered taxes and their purpose.
- jessaustin 11y agoWhat has paid for the devices under consideration in TFA? Why have those taxes not resulted in the usable machine described by GP?
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoSame reason a few billionaires passing around a hat wouldn't result in a secure device. Those billionaires are either already running the government or lobbying the poop out of it. Our system is kinda messed up right now.
- jMyles 11y agoSince the outcome of the process facilitated by these machines determines the authority to levy and spend taxes, doesn't it make sense - for this one particular expenditure - to have a wall of independence, both political and financial?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 11y agoA single million would get you a good solution. You'd need to set aside the remaining tens for lobbying to get it adopted.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoGovernments didn't make this device. They hired a contractor and/or purchased from a vendor (which likely specifically set up its business to profit from government contracts for voting machines). The vendor is almost exclusively interested in getting paid money from the contract, not with actually delivering a highly secure device that a democracy can depend on. Commercial viability of a solution is a non-issue. A device is either highly secure or it isn't.
- nmrm2 11y agoAbsolutely this. Federal and State governments should stop using contractors all together for software projects. Instead, hire a very large shared bank of highly-qualified engineers and pay competitive salaries. Even if those engineers sit around doing nothing most of the time (unlikely), they would still be extraordinarily cost-effective compared to pissing away hundreds of millions on projects that should only cost a few million. IMO it's impossible to take deficit hawks seriously if they don't back a blanket policy of starving out leeching contractors.
- digikata 11y agoThere is a strong current of blind faith right now that private services/products are automatically the most efficient choice. Really there's a lot of market conditions that need to be in place before that's likely for a specific product or service, but careful consideration gets overrun in the bigger meme of gov't bad/companies good.
- _pmf_ 11y ago> Only the military has the budget to design solutions from scratch. Define from scratch. It's perfectly reasonable and economically feasible to develop a SoM or SoC based hardware platform.