BlackBox Voting Tests California Diebold Machines

Doc Ruby writes "The California Secretary of State has invited Black Box Voting to hack away at some Diebold voting systems. The testing is set for Nov. 30, 2005. Evaluations conducted by Black Box Voting in San Joaquin, Marin, and Alameda counties (Calif.) reveal that a critical paper audit component is missing for all absentee and mail-in ballots, and also for recounts. (Black Box personnel were hired by the Libertarian Party to conduct inspections.)"

Comments

Re:Way

[nmb3000]

Any objection to a release of source code is utter lawyer bullshit.

You mean like a company wanting to protect it's investments?

People on Slashdot tend to forget that companies spend a LOT of time and money writing software. It makes absolutely no sense for them to do this and then go release it all for free to the public. Microsoft doesn't, IBM doesn't, and even the ever-pure Google doesn't. There really are good reasons why.

Say, for example, that Diebold does what you say. They go and release the source under the GPL and the Slashdot peasants rejoice! Huzzah! Suddenly everybody has access to the code that Diebold spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars writing. All of a sudden there's a whole bunch of other electronic voting companies that start up and offer their machines for less than Diebold because they aren't trying to recoup the costs of writing the voting software.

End result? Diebold either goes out of business or leaves that market because Bob's Voting Machines was able to sell for less and still make a profit.

So remind me, why in the world would they want to do what you're asking?

Right to vote

[Device666]

I think virusses should have voting rights to, especially when they are clever.. It would help us not to get into an illegal "preemptive" war.