The caption on the image
("If San Francisco moves forward in developing an open source voting system, paper ballots could be a thing of the past") is incorrect. The open-source voting plan has nothing to do with getting rid of paper ballots. Paper ballots will stick around.<p>San Francisco's election process has many distinct pieces, some of which currently involve software. For instance, the optical scanning machines that scan paper ballots run software. With this proposal, these machines will run open-source software.<p>The proposal isn't for a new electronic voting system (e.g. electronic voting machines), or to rid the city of paper ballots. It's just to improve the existing process.
Here's a better idea:<p>Get rid of electronic voting entirely.<p>It's an incredibly hard security problem that hasn't been solved. Making the software open-source is putting lipstick on a pig.<p>(Somewhat reassuringly, a slim majority of the readers of the article agree with me: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/k5OZ7vB.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/k5OZ7vB.png</a>)
Hell yes. This is totally amazing.<p>The beauty of developing an open-source voting platform is that it can be reproduced throughout the country, even throughout the world. All that was necessary was for someone to pay for it and use it.<p>Thank you San Francisco for being rich enough and wacky enough to make the world a slightly better place.
"The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2007) counted 39,044 general purpose local governments, which includes 19,492 municipal governments, 16,519 township governments and 3.033 county governments."<p>San Francisco tax payers do not need to carry the entire financial burden for an open source project that could benefit so many other governments. Partnerships are the way forward for a project like this.
Url changed from <a href="http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/102715/san-francisco-considers-pioneering-open-source-voting-mac" rel="nofollow">http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan...</a>, which points to this.