[clug] AEC denies FOI request to source code of 'EasyCount' for counting Senate votes.

[Alex Satrapa]

On 8 Jul 2014, at 12:25 , Andrew Donnellan <andrew at donnellan.id.au> wrote:

> (I also have very little reason to believe that the AEC would have
> anything even close to a nice, robust implementation that's truly
> trade-secret-worthy…)

I suspect that the spit-and-string house-of-cards nature of their software is what they’re attempting to avoid revealing to the world, for fear of political blow-back about the amount of money that’s been spent to build it.

It’s like the innumerable projects we’ve all heard of which will be released open source just as soon as the author gets things ready for publication, and then disappear.

Which seems more likely to you: AEC concerned about garage start-up eating their election counting lunch (elections involve much more than just counting votes), or AEC concerned that people will get angry when they find that manual intervention is required to get votes counted at all?

Alex