There is now: https://www.voting.works/ Their system has been used in real elections in Mississippi, and they’re actively working to expand to other states.
> If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it.
Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks
For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.
Indeed, this is called an "evil merge" [1], and here's [2] even an email with Linus mentioning it. I'm surprised the blog post doesn't mention evil merges by name, as this seems to be a prime example of why they're called evil.
If we're talking anecdotes, I've always been most creative when I have tight constraints to work within (technical, time, aesthetic etc). For example, some of my most imaginative code was when trying to fit some code into a teeny tiny microcontroller. Some of the most fun too (provided that time wasn't also a constraint, I find that mixing a time constraint with other constraints often turns it from a fun puzzle to a stressful task).
No, Los Angeles County's new tabulator isn't open source. Look what happened when someone tried to request the source code for their "open source" system (as LA County's press release called it). LA County replied that it's "exempt from disclosure" for a whole host of reasons (2 pages worth):
Thanks, Tom! If you could go back and make the decision over again, would you have done enterprise sooner, or later? Do you think GitHub would still have been very successful if you stuck only with SaaS?
Given today's tooling, I would probably have started later, but at the time it took us long enough to get a good Enterprise product put together that having started quite early gave us a reasonable timeline to enter the Enterprise market with a competent offering. I don't regret our timing at all.
The biggest problem with getting into Enterprise too early is that it will slow you down. With today's great tooling (e.g. Replicated) you can accelerate your technical solution, but you'll still be faced with the overall added complexity of an expanded deployment base, differing customer requirements, more complex (and demanding) support requests, long sales cycles requiring dedicated sales people, and a lot more. All of this to say, sometimes its better to keep velocity up so you can accomplish more with the goal of getting Enterprises to come to YOU.
This is basically what San Francisco, CA does. They use 3 10-sided dice to randomly choose 1% of ~600 precincts to manually audit. You can watch the random selection for the June 2018 election here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLSLlBkFY-Y
LA County has the right, and elsewhere they've said that they will (although of course plans change, with some caveats about device firmware and using it for your own elections
