"Jose" wrote in message
t...
Firefox is consumer grade. If it sort of works, that's good enough. I
would expect a higher level of vetting of voting software.

Why?

A voting machine with software that's not open source can still be vetted.
It's just that the people with specific authority to inspect it need some
sort of NDA. All that open source does is remove the minimal requirement of
non-disclosure.

People act like if something is open source, there are millions of
programmers out there poring over the code looking for flaws. That's just
not the case, even for desktop applications never mind something like a
voting machine. It would be trivial enough to simply require the code for a
voting machine to be provided to any inspector willing to sign the
appropriate agreements for non-disclosure. There aren't going to be that
many people actually looking at it.

And I did not say it would be flawless, just that it would be
significantly easier to detect flaws with open source than with secret
software, such as proposed by Diebold.

The primary difficulty is not providing the code to the inspectors. It's
the inspectors being able to validate the code. The hard part is actually
looking at the code, not getting access to it.

Open source does make access even easier, but it's by no means required for
the purpose of providing sufficient inspection. I definitely disagree with
the claim of "significantly easier to detect flaws". Open source isn't more
readable, it's not less obfuscated, it's not easier to validate. It's just
publicly available. That's all.

Open source doesn't really help with the technical aspect of inspection.
What it does help with is public trust. That's at least as important, IMHO,
but it's not relevant to the question of actually detecting flaws.

Pete