On Thursday 23 September 2004 13:36 Polazzo Justin wrote: > It is impossible for a company to be non-partisan. Perhaps. But that does not mean a company as an entity cannot be ethical and able to create a "non-partisan" voting system. The real question is not partisanship, it is trust. Who can The People trust to be ethical and create a fair voting system that is better than what has been used for decades if not centuries? I'm not so cynical that I believe no company could be trusted to create a non-partisan electronic voting system. Of course the trust should come with code review and oversight from groups selected by The People. > That is why it would be nice to develop an open source solution. > That would be non-partisan. Having being created by democrats, > republicans, anarchists, whoever wanted to contribute. Why would open source necessarily be better? Who gets to decide what actually gets put in front of the voters? The "open source community"? The "non-partisan" EFF? This mailing list? As far as I know most states in the USA have some sort of an oversight committee for voting issues. Those groups will make the decisions. Arguing about it on the Bugtrag list is unlikely to produce any tangible results unless the various voting commission members follow Bugtraq. I'm not too sure this is topical for this list either since I doubt any people that make decisions about voting systems follow Bugtraq. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise on the latter point. Gene -- Linux era4.eracc.UUCP 2.4.22-28mdkenterprise i686 11:37:26 up 211 days, 5:39, 13 users, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01 ERA Computer Consulting - http://www.eracc.com/ eCS, OS/2, Mandrake GNU/Linux, OpenServer & UnixWare resellers
