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> Why doesn't the United States (and other democracies) require open source voting software for all elections? One thing that's different about the US is that
by aazaa 6y ago
> Why doesn't the United States (and other democracies) require open source voting software for all elections?
One thing that's different about the US is that each state is responsible for carrying out its own elections. There is some federal involvement, but it's mostly up to the states to implement.
One often-cited advantage of this approach is that it makes it difficult to attack a presidential election because you'd have to work across different state voting systems.
So a national mandate would face opposition on the federalism issue.
- dariusj18 6y agoIt doesn't necessarily need to be a Federal government program,. It could be an initiative that all states take up on their own, or even a Federal mandate that voting software be open source.
- cle 6y agoTo expand on this, I’d totally support regulations requiring states to maintain some level of supply chain independence and diversity of software and hardware between them, to improve resilience against attacks.
- corytheboyd 6y agoI think a lot of people gloss over this because they don’t want it to be true, but it think it is. The red tape of it all actually makes it pretty damn secure, regardless of how “good” it is from the perspective of a software engineer. Imagine if every state used the same self hosted voting software, any weakness that can be attacked will be, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard to social engineer your way into local governments to exploit.
- veddox 6y agoThat is a point. On the other hand, with the electoral college system, you don‘t need to hack the entire US. A single swing-state might be enough.
- yongjik 6y agoI've said it before, but that's like arguing against company-wide approved security policy, because if every department implements security in their own way it would be harder for an outside attacker to hack them at the same time.