Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Electronic Voting Progress Limited
An anonymous reader points us to a story about how the problems with electronic voting mostly stem from one source: the lack of mandated standardization. The LinuxInsider article goes on to suggest that once the issue of a universal voting platform is solved, the way is paved for open-source software to address concerns over accuracy and transparency. Though the article states that "no open source program for voting machines yet exists," it should be noted that such software was successfully tested earlier this month. Quoting:
"People debate the merits of e-voting for a variety of reasons, including suspicion of new technologies and a general distrust of politics, according to Jamie McKown, Wiggins professor of government and polity at the College of the Atlantic. 'Reports on e-voting security often de-contextualize the history of voter fraud in this country, as if boxes were somehow assumed to be better. You constantly hear calls for paper trails, and open and free inspection of voting machine source code. But it's a very thorny issue and one that has a lot of facets,' McKown told LinuxInsider."
Paper votes 8/10. Electronic voting 5/10. This problem, like most things we vote on, isn't an either or choice. Our voting systems do a very poor job of capturing actual voter sentiment. That's why we really need to abandon our horrible plurality voting system, and start using range voting. It's no more complicated than the way judges evaluate olympic divers. Range voting is readily comprehensible, and far better than the terrible system we use now.
http://tinyurl.com/2g3rdx