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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

> If there is one thing I fail to understand it is the impulse to electronic-ify our elections.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but why would you expect anything different? As a layperson, why would I treat computerized voting any differently than online shopping or ordering an Uber or something like that?

The software engineering community deserves more blame for this type of thing. It's unreasonable to expect laypeople to be experts on every technology they use, and this crappy voting system didn't exactly write itself.

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But it's perfectly reasonable to expect the people tasked with evaluating voting systems to be experts on voting systems.

> This crappy voting system didn't write itself.

One of the downsides of programming being easily accessible and easy to get a job in is that there is no required standards body to write code. There's no way to fix this. The best you can do is refuse to hire people that worked on these or similar systems, and I'm sure they will find jobs somewhere within the government-contractor software engineering space.

> One of the downsides of programming being easily accessible and easy to get a job in is that there is no required standards body to write code. There's no way to fix this.

I guess that's what I was getting at. There never used to be a standards body for civil engineers, either, but after a while society got tired of bridges falling down and buildings collapsing. When will we get to that point with computer software?

It's kind of funny (or sad) that barbers and hair stylists need a license, but software engineers don't.

It isn't sufficient that people are upset about problems caused by people in a profession/trade. Instead a major source of regulation is the professionals/tradies themselves. "I spent five years at university, so they should too." "I'm a member of the Association of Software Professionals, so they should be too".

Since there's an unhealthy obsession with libertarian small government is software circles, it seems relatively unlikely this will happen any time soon. And we would rightly fear for our jobs if this happened, because I can't imagine the regulation applying to imported code.

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