[governance] Open Source Voting Software Concept Released

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 08:32:30AM -0400, Paul Lehto (lehto.paul at gmail.com) wrote:

> Sure.  Open source inspectors could still be paid. But by whom? The
> government? If so they are disqualified by conflict of interest since
> the government's own power is determined by elections.  If paid by a
> private party, they are not truly acting in the public interest even
> if the claim to be...  Only citizen violunteers will truly
> (potentially) act in the public interest, and only ON THE WHOLE -- not
> individually.  And these volunteers just don't have the resources to
> keep up with professional hackers.

Perhaps I misunderstood you - I thought you were saying closed
source is better than open in the context of election systems.
If your point was that open source does not solve the big problems,
fine - I'll grant that even if it is better than closed source here,
by itself it doesn't make much of a difference.

But in principle I think voting systems (electronic or otherwise)
should be as open as possible in all their aspects, so that all
who want can inspect them to convince themselves of their fairness,
and that implies open source (or at least public source),
among other things.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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