Tuesday, March 18, 2008
When Will US Voting be based on Open Systems?
A recent post shows that the developers of electronic voting machines for the United States will continue to fight any objective investigation of their systems. The case is simple: do we rely on the vulnerabilities of a software development process protected by "security through obscurity", or do we - as a nation - start to get serious about the voting processes that underlie the foundation of our government?
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1 comments:
Well, there's no incentive for the vendors (Diebold, etc.) to change, and there's never any incentive for the elected officials to change the status quo, so the initiative has to come from the grass roots.
Moreover, the local governments don't go looking for anything proactively; they respond to vendors who come to court them. So any effort will have to have a "vendor" to push the technology. Hence, we need a company that will build the systems based on the open standards and sell them to the municipalities.
I have seen a couple of groups championing the idea (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ for instance), but I don't know exactly who's backing them.
There's probably an opportunity here for a company that's willing to align to an open systems and/or open source agenda, but the competition is horrible. Might be an interesting idea for a consortium of tech companies on a CSR basis.
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