Electronic voting feasibility

[Peter Hansen]

Greg Steffensen wrote:
> Glad to hear that python is less susceptible to buffer-overflows; if
> part of the system ended up touching the disk, would python's speed
> make it susceptible to race conditions?

Race conditions can occur with *anything*, and are generally
a design issue, not a performance issue.  Python's speed
shouldn't be a concern here, with proper design (and the
same thing needs to be said for C or assembly).

I'm not sure why you tie that possibility to "touching the disk",
though.  What does that have to do with race conditions?

Rather than answer detailed questions, I would simply say this
to you.  Python is very well suited to doing a prototype of
an open source voting system.  You might want to check the
archives for this list before you start something from scratch,
however: 
http://groups.google.ca/groups?q=open+source+voting+system+group%3Acomp.lang.python.*

(Now I'm curious what happened to that project... Anand?  David?)

(That might lead you here http://evm2003.sourceforge.net/index.html
and http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ and from those you will
find many other links to reference material.)

-Peter