Our country is facing the biggest threat to our way of life, ever. It is not Osama, not Bush, and not Hillary. It is the risk that we may lose what makes this country what it is. It is our freedom to choose our elected officials. The time has passed when it was acceptable to turn a blind eye to the problems with electronic voting. Incidents like Florida 13 are unacceptable and all too common. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be so hard.

We’ve tried to modernize our voting process, but we’ve failed miserably. The closed-platform competition between voting machine companies just won’t work. Not only is it unnecessary for each individual company to re-invent the wheel with their platform, but it is scary that we are voting into a black box.

The solution is all too simple. Electronic voting is a perfect candidate for open source development. Pick a few intelligent people from Black Box Voting, a few well-known security gurus, a user-interface expert or two from CMU or MIT, and a handful of programmers and put together an open platform. The interface and software should be open and universal. While the code can be constantly evolving, no changes by the manufacturers need to be allowed. What manufacturers you say? The ones that are already designing and building electronic voting machines. Let them compete on size and weight, price and service. Let them design better machines that last longer and work better. Not spend time researching and developing the best user interface and software platform for tracking votes. That is not a trivial task, and is absolutely not something America should allow to be a black box.

Here’s another reason a fixed but open platform is THE solution. Every high school in America could have an AmericaVote machine. Every single high school graduate would be REQUIRED to have operated a voting machine before they finish. Johnny moves from Oregon to Florida? Fortunately, he knows how to operate a voting machine properly because they’re all EXACTLY THE SAME.

The argument that open source software is dangerous because its open has been beaten to death. I’m not even going to touch on it. It has been proven fallacious over and over again.

The fact that we’re allowing this electronic voting farce to continue is asinine. I don’t care how much Diebold or Sequoia has sunk into their development. Those are the breaks of business. Throw it all away, and start building a machine to run the AmericaVote software. This shit has gotten out of hand.

If you haven’t already, go donate some money to Black Box Voting. If you cared about this country, you’d have already done it.

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