welcome to the machine
So instead of ‘open source’ software to tabulate the votes as they are entered into the machines, private companies got to write private code for the purpose. (‘Open source’ software is any program whose code is publicly available, so that ordinary people may fail to understand it, not just computer experts). Now Australia has computerized voting, and the source code is readily available (it can be found at http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html, if you’re that much of a geek). I’ve looked at it and it’s so short and simple a monkey could understand it. My monkey has looked at it too, and he assures me this is the case. But the American code is not only secret, it’s also 200,000 lines long, which makes it ‘spaghetti code’, so called because it’s impossibly tangled and complex, or because it’s made of pasta.Not only is the American voting code secretly held by private companies (naturally for copyright reasons; the Dollar trumps Democracy every time), but private companies manufacture the voting machines. And those companies are owned, predominantly, by Republican interests. Including Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who won by a landslide on machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a company he owned a considerable interest in. And he wasn’t the only one.
And it continues to get ickier from there.
20 May 2003, 12:23 ::
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