As a counterpoint: Are there any best voting machines, both in the sense that they are objectively better than the others, but also that they implement best practices regarding how votes are collected, tallied, stored, and reported? If not, is it because there is just no market pressure to produce such a system?
I know in the past I’ve see calls to action asking for an open source alternative to proprietary voting systems. Does anyone know of any that have reached a level of maturity that they could provide the basis for one or more organizations to compete with the commercial offerings? If something could be built with free software and widely available hardware, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be cheaper, and therefore an easy sell to a government regardless of their current power structure, assuming a rational decision making process. At that point, the fact that they should be transparent and accountable just sort of comes with the package.
In other words, if we can somehow make it easy for them to choose the path the provides the most protection from corruption without making it specifically about corruption, does that more likely to success that trying to attack the problem head-on?
