Open source voting- the time is now
If you stop to ponder it, you’ll quickly go mad. The notion that our most basic right as a citizen- the right to elect our leaders- is up for bid to the Diebolds of the world, is untenable from the start. To allow elections to be decided based on what comes out of a unverifiable black box system of voting is unacceptable in this day and age. There can be no confidence in a system that cannot be tested.
But there is an alternative, one that doesn’t have us scribbling with #2 pencils or creating hanging chads- open source voting. Open source software is software created transparently; anyone can download the code, study it, modify it, and in turn their contributions are peer reviewed by anyone with the skill to do so. You can read more about the open source concept here. So it only makes sense to entrust our system of voting to the most efficient, transparent system we can create.
Open source voting has been adopted in various places around the world, but of course meets with objections in this country from the established, connected, and completely unreliable if not outright corrupt vote tabulation industry and their “elected” officials. So it is a welcome sign to find the Open Voting Consortium, a group dedicated to the acceptance of a transparent voting system in this country. It’s well worth your time to read about what they are planning, because there is truly no more fundamental truth than this: If you can’t trust your vote, then you can’t trust your government. The famous quote ‘It’s Not the People Who Vote that Count; It’s the People Who Count the Votes’ might not actually be from Stalin, but the thought is certainly true enough. We have recently seen eight years of a presidency that had two disputed “elections”, the first wiping out the wishes of the majority of the electorate by judicial fiat, the second by election fraud committed by such sterling examples of democracy as Kenneth Blackwell, who was allowed to be both a Bush campaign official AND the Secretary of State of Ohio, in charge of elections. It is a laughably corrupted system, built carefully by those with a vested interest in an opaque system of voting.
Read up on it, its your duty as a citizen. That, or continue to let those who count the votes decide who will or will not represent you. Your call.
