[cryptoz]

Who is making the software for this? Is that software open source? Did you know that US Presidential Elections use 10M+ voting machines that are closed-source, and made by a company friendly to the Republican Party?

So here, the government steps in and says "here's some closed-source software that you now will trust your life, security, property and government with. You're not allowed to know how it works, if you try to find out we'll throw you in prison."

Yes, HN tends to be wayyyy on the side of disbelief in the official words of the government on topics of software & trust. But isn't that healthy? Isn't that the way it should be? When the governments come at us with secret software and threatens us against learning about it, we should absolutely assume that it is intended for evil. Otherwise, how will we know when it "actually" is?

[Someone]

"Did you know that US Presidential Elections use 10M+ voting machines"

Not that the number of voting machines has any influence on the ease with which electronic voting can be manipulated, but less than 130M votes (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_S...), distributed over 10M+ machines? That's less than 13 votes per machine, on average. if that is true, someone has been overspending seriously on hardware.

[cryptoz]

Hm. Perhaps I remember incorrectly, and it was not 10M machines, but 10M votes "counted" through those machines.

[encoderer]

> Did you know that US Presidential Elections use 10M+ voting machines that are closed-source, and made by a company friendly to the Republican Party

Yet republicans have lost 5 of the last 6 presidential votes.

[iak8god]

Diebold didn't get involved in elections until 2002. The only Republican president to serve since then won reelection in 2004 and then left the White House with low approval ratings unprecedented since Nixon (< 30%). There could have been massive fraud in favor of the Republicans in 2008 (not claiming this happened) and the Democrats still would have wiped the floor with them.

Anyway, partisan politics is a distraction here: the integrity of our elections is increasingly in the hands of a few voting machine manufacturers who sell hackable, un-auditable black box systems. Here are some starting points in case you're interested in this beyond the typical R/D sniping:

* https://www.eff.org/issues/e-voting

* http://blackboxvoting.org/

[dubfan]

That's just a red herring to make you think they aren't rigging elections!

</tinfoilhat>