Sean McGrath - and a lot of other people - have been piling on about how voting machines just have to be open source in order to be safe. I don't really care about the politics of this - let's look at the claim though. If no closed source system is safe for voting, then how safe is closed source for anything? i.e., if you advocate this position, then you should not be using WIndows, or Oracle, or SQL Server, or Solaris, or Java, or Smalltalk (outside of Squeak or Gnu ST) - etc. Somehow I doubt that all these advocates are quite that consistent.... [James Robertson]
They may be inconsistent, and there may be some milage in answering that closed source isn't safe for anything, but the implication that every little business transaction or letter to a friend is even nearly as critical as the voting systems that our (supposed) democracies rely on is absurd. And this still applies when it's billions of business transactions.
Surely if a voting system isn't completely transparent, it isn't democratic.
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