On Thursday 23 September 2004 13:36
Polazzo Justin wrote:
It is impossible for a company to be non-partisan.
Perhaps. But that does not mean a company as an entity cannot be
ethical and able to create a "non-partisan" voting system. The real
question is not partisanship, it is trust. Who can The People trust
to be ethical and create a fair voting system that is better than
what has been used for decades if not centuries? I'm not so cynical
that I believe no company could be trusted to create a non-partisan
electronic voting system. Of course the trust should come with code
review and oversight from groups selected by The People.
That is why it would be nice to develop an open source solution.
That would be non-partisan. Having being created by democrats,
republicans, anarchists, whoever wanted to contribute.
Why would open source necessarily be better? Who gets to decide what
actually gets put in front of the voters? The "open source
community"? The "non-partisan" EFF? This mailing list?
As far as I know most states in the USA have some sort of an
oversight committee for voting issues. Those groups will make the
decisions. Arguing about it on the Bugtrag list is unlikely to
produce any tangible results unless the various voting commission
members follow Bugtraq. I'm not too sure this is topical for this
list either since I doubt any people that make decisions about voting
systems follow Bugtraq. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise on the
latter point.
Gene
--
Linux era4.eracc.UUCP 2.4.22-28mdkenterprise i686
11:37:26 up 211 days, 5:39, 13 users, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01
ERA Computer Consulting - http://www.eracc.com/
eCS, OS/2, Mandrake GNU/Linux, OpenServer & UnixWare resellers
