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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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See, this is dumb. Not you, I mean. Program to format text documents and automate office paperwork, sure. I prefer TeX but YMMV. But how do you commercialise voting? Oh, "it's America". I guess.
There was a good Tom Scott that pointed out the problem of electronic voting is not just the reliability and trustworthiness of the systems, but the transparency for ordinary people to know it's trustworthy.
You can't achieve that perfectly with computers - not even with paper - but it's important. Obviously to me, that would mean having the system open source, with closed (for extra security) extra measures for auditing. I understand them not doing that, but the government not wanting the voting software and systems to be fully open to government? That just blows the mind ...though I kind of expected it.
As to redundancy and lack of bugs, there are some impressive programs out there by people who've got what it takes to make things very precise from formal definitions and so on (cf some of the Functional Programming community, amongst others, and certain un-bloated well-defined security things). Does the American government not have access to such people? Did they spend all their money on TV shows so they've none left for good programmers? And tallying election votes is not really the most elaborate of tasks, more one that needs formally defining very carefully. No ML professors left over from the dark ages who can write a formal spec as a PhD? How about all those NSA lot who are supposed to be able to make spyware so clever it slips between the cracks in Apple phones? I suppose that's a field more of try lots of things and hope some work, but still.
Sorry, rant over ;-)
The source being open doesn't mean you can tamper with it. It means you can see it (in this case).
Did you mean "can't"?
Open source lets the general public* audit it to know exactly what it's doing. So much of the world revolves around layers of secrecy and convenience-trust. Elections should not be so!
*Or members thereof
I meant "can". If the repo is read only you can't change the code.
Okay. I think I missed your meaning a bit then.
Agreed for sure. Open source doesn't (by its openness) mean people can tamper with it.