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.'"

Comments

Open source election systems

[dn15]

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.

That's the kind of stuff I like to hear. Putting aside whether or not elections were "stolen" in the past (how can it be proven one way or another?) it's important to have as much transparency as possible in the voting system. That way we can at least reduce the likelihood of election fraud.

Re:Open source election systems

[dn15]

Can we please stop getting all warm and cosy about candidates because they throw out "tech-savvy" words and we're supposed to be nerds?

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?

Re:Open source election systems

[NMerriam]

congress makes laws, not the president...in case anyone forgot. sure, he can veto

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.

Re:Fragmenting the vote

[catbutt]

Actually, organizing to avoid fragmenting is what causes partisanship. Duvergers law.

Condorcet and/or approval voting solves this problem, but until we have that, we're stuck with partisanship and all the screwiness of plurality elections.