Why aren't US voting machines open source?
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?
You are viewing a single comment
Why Electronic Voting ls Still A Bad ldea, a video by Tom Scott:
https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs
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.
That's how they do it where I live!
I absolutely agree. Vote counting & tallying machines are fine, but you always want that paper trail.
Mail in voting baby! I want every U.S. citizen to have this right.
Brazil has changed to electronic voting since 1996 and faces none of these issues.
the only issue it faces is fascists trying to sow distrust.
Exactly. Every election you see a handful of right wingers claiming that the machines and/or code is unsafe and can be easily tampered with, but have absolutely nothing to back that up, and yet another election passes without anyone anywhere proving that our system is unsafe/a bad idea.
This Tom Scott video is terrible, should be renamed "why electronic voting is a bad idea (for fascists)
this video has 3 years.
3 years is a lot to somethings to be mature. He tells about Trust & Anonymity. You can't trust anonymity 'coz you can trace the vote and bla bla bla. Well, you can trace the regular method too. Trust, you can't trust the way the vote leaves the booth to the central. You know the Hash initiative? Even a small number change will be shown to everyone.
This video is 3 years old, Brazil's electronic voting system is 27 years old and there hasn't been anyone proving that it is a bad idea, unsafe, tamperable or anything of the sort.
I like Tom but this video really irritates me. It just seems like he's pulling generic arguments out of his ass without any actual research.
Importantly, Open Source is not feasible as a safeguard because there would be no way of verifying that the voting machine is running a build from the public source.