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John Edwards on Open Source Voting Machines
goombah99 writes "John Edwards, the presidential candidate and lawyer, is standing out from the pack by showing himself to be a bit tech savvy. In 2003 he was a guest host on Lawrence Lessig's Blog, giving his view on the imbalance between property right protection and the good of public access. As of this week he has become the first presidential candidate to support 'open source code' for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records. He's even personally using Twitter. 'Currently, software used in election systems remains the proprietary property of vendors. This situation has created a continual problem when anomalous results have been reported and independent experts are denied the ability to review how the systems work. A growing body of critics oppose this privatization of the voting system.'"
Pretending that the free market can solve every problem known to man is beyond naive. The worst part is that Mr. Paul acknowledges that the military can't be disolved, but won't apply the same logic to more serious problems of civilized man: health care and information access.
The airwaves and telephone networks would not exist without public land, pretending that allowing one corporation to own all that spectrum or all those acres of land is good for the consumer is ridiculous. The market forces do not apply when the resource is of such a limited nature, the PEOPLE must regulate!
Similarly, the market can't decide when a surgery is a good idea. There isn't a profit opportunity there, it's humanities compassion for eachother and lust for life made manifest! Again, the PEOPLE have to take control of this, but Mr. Paul would again make no inroads on this issue...
He's better than most of the other candidates but IMHO his ideals get in the way of his reason...
There, no we can both be offtopic...
I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I've been thinking we needed open-source election software (if we are to use electronic voting) ever since the whole Bush election debacle originally occurred. Am I supposed to not care when a candidate makes a statement in support of that idea? The fact that this idea also happens to be popular today with geeks on Slashdot doesn't make it wrong.
And yes, I fully realize he would not be in a position to mandate open-source voting kiosks even if elected. But it is reasonable to judge our candidates based on their views (in addition to their track records, of course), right?
Literally true, but when Congress and the White House are held by the same party, the President is generally the one who begins any significant initiatives, since he is the "standard bearer" of the party. Many of the major laws passed in the last 7 years have been written entirely by White House staff and then handed off to a sponsor in Congress. Presumably if a democratic presidential candidate wins, that will mean the democrats have at least held congress if not built an even more significant majority, so Edwards' opinion on legislative matters is hardly irrelevant.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.