from the wired article: "...the election technology business was a heavily consolidated industry—a cartel, essentially, of just three vendors, all owned by pri

from the wired article: "...the election technology business was a heavily consolidated industry—a cartel, essentially, of just three vendors, all owned by private equity firms—that was starved for profit and all but incapable of innovation. Subsequent research suggested that the companies earned their most stable revenue through a maze of fees: maintenance, upkeep, software licenses. Their core business model seemed to involve locking clients into relationships of “ongoing annual payments.” Small wonder, then, that the firms hadn't leapt to DeBeauvoir's idea of building a machine with open source code that aimed to liberate local governments with cheap, self-sustaining technology." that's just one of the thousand cuts of corruption undermining our democratic republic. consolidation (including in government, via a 2-party system) has unquestionably proven to be a social bad. in any case, the wired story was interesting and informative. the STAR system (potentially) solves the problem of verifiability with secrecy, but not the issue of better representing the people's will in voting. for the record, i'm partial to score voting (like nicky case) with a 7-point scale.