Yes, the system is stacked against the poor, but there are people fighting that. If they are fighting and failing then we need to know why.
If they aren’t fighting at all then (in part, but it’s still a significant part I’m afraid) it’s because of attitudes like this.
All of these companies claim that their source code is valuable intellectual property and that disclosing it can hurt their business. Even if this were true, when you're providing something that can be a significant factor in someone being imprisoned or executed, when creating the business you should accept that you're providing a public service that needs to be publicly accountable.
If it's not open source, at the very least there should be a requirement that software code and hardware designs must be provided on-demand to experts in court cases (with a non-disclosure clause to mitigate leaks and corporate espionage etc.).
And there's an entire body of law based around IP which they can use to protect their business, just like everybody else.
Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism to protect IP that I can't think of.
It has been shown to us time and time again that no actual evidence is required to get people to believe what they want to believe.
And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
It would have changed some peoples minds I don't know if the change would have been a few thousand or 10s of millions. I can't say if it would have a dent in the 1/3 of people or not. I can't predict that. It would have helped me with my own peace of mind. And frank I think it's overall the right thing for us to do.
>And the more technical the evidence (i.e. source code), the less helpful.
Disinformation is powerful, I'm not suggesting this alone would fix that. I disagree that more technical evidence is harmful. Global warming is benefiting from transparency and evidence. It takes generations to change political will not years. The evidence there has shifted our whole economy, just maybe not fast enough.
There will always, always be deniers. Global warming, flat earth, vaccinations, etc. Evidence _helps_ battle deniers in these areas, but it takes generations for these ideas to become mainstream and the deniers to go from 99% of people to 2% of people.
Also, 2% of people think the earth is flat? Holy crap. https://www.sciencealert.com/one-third-millennials-believe-f...
It's like saying that better proof of evolution would convince some portion of creationists. That's just not how misinformation works.
Misinformation works by targeting vulnerable parties with misinformation that aligns with their existing vulnerabilities and beliefs in order to power relevant action with long stored and fruitful sources of hate, bias, and scorn in a fashion that bypasses the brain and goes right for the gut.
Like 30% in America believe in a young earth that is thousands not billions of years old.
If Bob is a scientist of some sort and presenting interesting scientific work to the community and incidentally advising the government on environmental policy that will harm some business and you want to crush support for this by playing on existing biases with this group you advertise to the young earth crowd about how bob is anti God and see if you can tie bob to as many negative things they already dislike as you can.
You aren't fighting an intellectual battle to set their ideas on bob let alone deeper ideas you are fighting an emotional battle to galvanize existing deeply held beliefs to obtain useful action like calling up and yelling at their congressman or voting.
In that context asking Bob to present a better case is laughable. The relevant parties never engaged their brain in the first place.
The county can then verify the software by manually counting a random selection of paper votes to see if they match the software. If they do, then the software is correct, otherwise it is not. You then have a full by-hand recount and tell the vendor to fix their software.
Not because of the possibility of voting machines being hacked, but because it is important for the public to have trust in the system. It is difficult to trust a system you do not understand, and only a very small minority is ever going to be able to audit voting software.
(I'm not American, so this is in no way a comment on your current predicament.)