Thought experiment

[unixronin]

cipherpunk posted yesterday about a paper on the weaknesses of DRE voting machines.  And it got me thinking.

Suppose that every state, when requesting bids for voting machines, were to include a clause like the following in the request for proposals:

"n.  By submitting a bid in response to this request, you grant permission for an independent security audit of the submitted voting equipment prior to completion of the bid process, said audit to be performed by agents including but not limited to an agent or multiple agents appointed by $state, and agree to cooperate fully and in a timely manner with any and all such audits."

I think the results might be interesting.  Discuss.

Comments

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

I hate to promote the conspiracy theory idea / idiocy, but I'd suggest that for the corporations involved, and for the politicians (appointed & elected both) involved in the decision-making having truly good design is unimportant. Any with power over the choice of machine are likely to be in a position to abuse the mistakes in design. Moreover any particular company that "won" such a competition would instantly have pricing power to charge more and no politician wants to be in a position of having to choose proven trust and reliability at high cost against promises (even proven false ones) of trust and reliability at lower cost. Witness the lengths to which the US of A hides its military & intelligence expenditure breakdowns.