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Am I alone in having serious doubts of the ability to have an open source implementation of a voting machine? The problem is that to have any benefit from havi
by demallien 18y ago
Am I alone in having serious doubts of the ability to have an open source implementation of a voting machine?
The problem is that to have any benefit from having an open source solution, all of the code in the system needs to be open source, including all of the drivers etc. As drivers need to be adapted to the specific hardware that they run on, it is normally only the manufacturer of the equipment that can write them. Think video drivers in Linux, as an example. Hardware manufacturers probably see little commercial advantage in providing their source code, and even if they do, there is no guarantee that what they give out as source code is really what they have loaded into the voting machine.
- rcoder 18y agoIt's not about them seeing the "commercial advantage" in free market terms; it's about mandating a particular approach (in this case, open hardware and software from top to bottom) because it's the only way to insure that the basic infrastructure used in elections works. This is not a case where the whims of the market should decide the approach taken. If no one gets rich on the design and implementation of electronic voting systems, that's fine. I'd rather see it run by well-intentioned, poorly-paid academics within a strict peer-review model than by unknown private entities.
- olefoo 18y agoActually that could be turned around to drive hardware manufacturers to open source, along the lines of, "if you want to play in this important and visible market, your drivers have to be open source".