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?

  • Hari Seldon
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    2 years ago

    Voting machines are the most utterly stupid thing ever created. Why don’t you use paper ballots as other countries do?

    • @local_taxi_fix@lemmy.world
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      02 years ago

      We do, there are very few counties in the US that are actually fully digital (stupid idea IMHO). The majority are paper ballots which are scanned into the machine for fast counting. The original paper the voter filled out is then stored in case it needs to be checked against the machine count for accuracy.

      • lol3droflxp
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        12 years ago

        Interesting that it takes so ridiculously long to count then, in Germany the votes are counted on paper by hand and they’re down within maximum 3 days.

        • @Dandroid@lemmy.world
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          12 years ago

          It only started taking more than one day recently. My conspiracy theory is that it is so we have to watch the news for three days instead, which makes them a ton of money.

    • John Richard
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      -12 years ago

      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.

  • neon_cat
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    -12 years ago

    There are probably two reasons:

    1. 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.

    2. 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.