I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Do you think most of the people in government know what open source means? The concept of facebook confuses them lol
I don’t know about most, but I think the number of people in government willing to accept bribes and kickbacks for picking a particular overpriced vendor is probably greater.
A lot of folks unfortunately think open-source software is much more vulnerable than closed-source software because anyone can inspect it. The great irony of it, as everyone here knows, the opposite is actually often true.
Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:
Electronic voting could use open source software, but so can a machine that scans a marked ballot. The best practice is to have voters mark a physical ballot, then have them put it in a machine (running open source software) that scans and tabulates the results. If there’s a question about the integrity of the results, we can go back and count physical ballots.
Mail in voting baby! I want every U.S. citizen to have this right.
There are probably two reasons:
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It wouldn’t change how the public thinks about them. People wouldn’t understand how voting machines work, even if they were open source. Do you expect normal people to look at and understand code? Also people who have lost hope in democracy and want to believe that the election was a hoax will continue to do so anyway.
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It’s probably more comfortable for the manufacturers of those machines to keep them closed source. Why would they show the world how they work? That would disclose potential flaws which is bad for their reputation. And it would make it easier for competition to emerge.
p.s. I agree that voting machines are bollocks.
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