[governance] Open Source Voting Software Concept Released

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 04:54:43PM -0700, Paul Lehto (lehto.paul at gmail.com) wrote:

> Given that, in an important election, a cheater or an insider can
> economically justify spending up to billions of dollars in a
> sophisticated cheating regime (given the trillions in spending that
> might be controlled not to mention control of the world's sole
> superpower if the election is for the presidency of the USA), how can
> volunteers possibly keep up with that?  They can't.  Unlike other
> scenarios where open source philosophy and approach can work
> beautifully, it can't in elections.

There must be some misunderstanding here.

"Open source" does not mean or imply "non-professional" or
"done by volunteers" or "not paid for" or even "non-commercial".
It just means the source is in the open, available for everyone to see.

And while that obviously doesn't solve all problems in elections, it
just as obviously makes it at least a little harder to get away with
poor software.

Thus, I believe any election software should be open source, but at
the same time it should be done professionally and paid for by the
state, without particularly trying to save money thereby.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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