[cmurf]

The difficulty is the purse strings to pay for election infrastructure comes from politicians. Private firms have funds for product advocacy without advance funding from government, unlike open source solutions. So the entire field is distorted from day 0 when it comes to proprietary vs open source.

A smarter thing to do would be to create a selection pool defined as any registered voter over the age of 75; and from that pool they choose their election technology board. And that board procures the election system based on the budget the legislature gives them. That is, the budget is the budget only, it doesn't say anything about what technology or brand is used, the only attachment is that funds are used for the state election system. If someone over 75 can't understand how our election system works, we're screwed, and in fact we've seen how voting systems have failed, have altered the outcome of elections, and because they had no paper trail, and no meaningful way to do recounts or audits there's no recourse.