DanKohn.com

The NYT reports what should have been obvious, that closed, proprietary election systems are certain to have undisclosed bugs, and that those bugs can endanger our democracy (think Florida).

The solution is an open source effort to make a CD-ROM that drives a reference platform touchscreen PC, so that the code is open to all to verify, every CD-ROM can be check against the public code, and every voting machine can be confirmed to run the CD-ROM. Most important, such a system needs to have a voter-verifed paper trail with those paper ballots being the actual deciding record.

I would like to start a 501(c)3 to sponsor such an initiative, but I have not yet been able to find the time.

Here’s the analysis of the software.

I’m happy to admit to being a bright. As Daniel Dennett says in an NYT op-ed: “A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view…. We are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don’t trust God to save humanity from its follies.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said to a Senate committee yesterday: “The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11.”

As the WSJ’s Best of the Web explains:

Rumsfeld is exactly right, and the Democrats will self-destruct unless they grasp the political ramifications of the national epiphany that was Sept. 11. The response that “Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11,” though possibly accurate, is beside the point–the equivalent of arguing in 1942 that Germany had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. FDR and Truman knew who America’s enemies were, but many of their heirs seem not to.

I’m still deeply troubled by the intelligence failures showing WMD in Iraq, but I do not believe the war will be a successful political issue for the Democrats, and I think we should all agree on the paramount importance of not losing the peace in Iraq.