Re: A call for volunteer coders: urgent national e-vote project

I'm writing today to ask for your help because I'm very, very frightenedSince, generically anyhow, an open source system provides access to anybody to use/manipulate/modify an existing system. Isn't this a direct violation of the law? And therefore you are solving a problem with a bigger problem!

What you need to do is provide legal representations, through your local congressman -packed with your findings - to the US authority, responsible for the overall supervision of the scheme so as such 'changes/modifications, can be made, legally' compulsory legislations. To simply invite programmers to create an open source system will not make a shred of difference -and above all you are making yourself and others liable to state prosecution for interfering with public domain data.

A better idea is to conduct a thorough research -quantative and qualative - into a potential source code that could guarantee true voting calculation/ true representation of factual votes and present your findings (hypothesis and conclusion) through an academic paper that could be forwarded to the appropriate authority (you may even get a government grant to do such work)!

Now enough of using this list as a venue to expressing unwanted political issues, this is meant as a technical repository.

 

Ahmed

ahmed.bagi@virgin.net