“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said." (1)
Apparently these companies make it very difficult for us to have standardization of practice (for reasons which are not obvious, we can extract and dissect in the discussion). Miller purports, "If they simply sold the machines to all the precincts, they would have three million sales and that would be the end of their business." So what do we see instead? Machines which frequently and according to Miller, malfunction, planned obsolence, long-term Draconian-termed contracts and continual "updates".
1)Zetter, Kim, "Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released" Accessed November 4, 2009, -http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/-published in Wired online magazine October 23, 2009
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So what exactly is the problem? It is not clearly stated and when I look up the Open Source Digital Voting foundation all it says is “The OSDV Foundation mission is to create publicly owned transparent, trustworthy voting technology for any U.S. elections jurisdiction”. So, I will go ahead and publicly announce I will be creating a vaccine against death crystals, due out sometime mid-December to help protect you and your family!
ReplyDeleteSorry, couldn’t resist. So the problem is there is a bi-opoly on the voting machines? Also, these machines are not transparent (this is inferred from the statements made by OSDV).
I don’t think these two companies are colluding to prevent standardizes polling/ballot procedures. I think States choose.
It's the proprietary nature of it apparently. Having working voting systems (IT supported as this is the 21st century) should be a simple matter. Gregory Miller is saying this is not the case. These companies are out first to make money, not provide reliable voting machines. So what do they do? They create (his words now) Draconian Contracts by which states must abide even if better vendors make offers, analagous to your cell phone contract. They deliberately make machines that break down and malfunction in counting so that states rely on their technicians to repair the machiens constantly. Miller didn't say it, but this seems a lot like cell phone business models.
ReplyDeleteHis argument is, since this is a vital democratic public service, the voting machines have to be consistent and reliable and private sector business is not doing this for us (case in point in part last year's MN senator race).