Electronic voting feasibility

[David Mertz, Ph.D.]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message news:<edKdnSLmIpFzUNzcRVn-vw at powergate.ca>...
> > > (Now I'm curious what happened to that project... Anand?  David?)
> Answered at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/news.html
>  (Summary: the prototype was demonstrated with success.  Python
> and lots of hard work by volunteers got the job done.)

Peter's summary is basically right.  Python worked great to make the
demo system--and I still hope it will be used to make the production
system.  I think Python is exactly the right choice; it's too bad a
lot of people have a wrongheaded idea about static typing magically
improving the security of systems (but a vague sentiment that Java or
C would be better for some ill-defined reason comes up sometimes).

But since the successful demo, we've mostly been in a political
lobbying and applying-for-grants mode.  I won't go into all of it, but
there's a lot going on on several legislative fronts, and in the
lobbying of political decisions by voting officials at different
levels.  To move the system along, we probably need to obtain one of
the several large-scale funding proposals we've put forward. 
Volunteers are great, but this is probably a thing that needs some
more formal, funded development to get certified.

Hopefully some more Python programming in the near future, on this
front.

Yours, David...