German Elections Go Open Source

Get Behind the Mule writes "The Heise news ticker is reporting that the software used by the German government to handle the results of the Bundestag election (that's the national parliament) on September 22nd will be based on open source platforms. The system will be written in Java and deploy Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL, and is being developed by the Berlin software firm IVU (here's their press release), working with the Statisches Bundesamt (the federal statistics office). It's not clear from the announcements whether the source code of the application itself, and not just the servers it runs on, will be publically available. Nevertheless, one is reminded of the argument of Peruvian congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez (seen recently in Slashdot) that open source software enables citizens of a democracy to see for themselves whether the work of government, such as elections, is conducted as it should be. All of the announcements are in German, so go fish. The software, as described in the announcements, will compute preliminary results (which are announced as soon as possible after the polls close), run plausibility checks, and determine the Bundestag membership as well as distribution of seats to the political parties. It will use web clients for entry of voting data, data import, presentation of results, and preparation of printed results. It will be based on a three-level architecture (apparently standard J2EE) and deploy Enterprise Java Beans."

Comments

Re:Better than Babel?

[adamwright]

[OT] - Abacho translates using "Systran", which is the same engine as Babelfish. I'm not sure if they have a later version, but they should both be of equal quality.

Re:Subject Here

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Thanks! I now have a new .sig!

graspee

Re:Before you start thinking the US should try thi

[GMontag]

2000 US presidential election Bob Beckel proposed to invistigate electors and blackmail them. Guess what? He ain't a Republican, he is a Democrat.

In 1960 a worse problem than Florida in 2000 cropped up and it was left to the President of the Senate to choose which set of electors to use from Hawaii, a very close vote there. Richard Nixon chose the set that gave the election to John F. Kennedy, because it was the right thing to do.

Don't believe me? Look it up yourself on Google, I will not give you links that only support my side of the arguement.