TALL blog

There’s a whole raft of issues involved with having fair elections, but Mako Hill is doing impressive things with his RubyVote Election Methods Library (and it’s web-based interface Selectricity) – like hooking up with MTV.

This could be great for two big reasons:

1. Trustworthy election software (Diebold is a good counter example). Mako doesn’t seem too bothered about governments using RubyVote for “important” elections, but the tendency for good quality open source to be picked up and used may be a factor.
2. Increasing buy-in to elections:
   

   “One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn’t yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We’re hoping that MTV — and eventually American Idol — will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters.”

   – Chris Csikszentmihályi

This entry was posted by David Balch on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under community, Open source, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.