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20040908 Wednesday September 08, 2004

SunRay and voting machine.

I carpool with my coworker, and having two software geeks in a car for 30 minutes often lead to interesting discussions. This morning's topic was Diebold and voting machine (if "Diebold" and "voting" don't ring any bell, check 
this,
this or  this out).



Anyway, we were talking mostly about how we can design a voting system that will be safe, secure and fail-proof. And my coworker suggested using a SunRay based system, but he wasn't sure installing a sunray server in every voting station is a very good idea. I told him about our wonderful
SunRay over WAN, and it was clear to both of us that SunRay over WAN would be a perfect platform for voting (that is, if SunRay supports a touch screen).



The benefits are countless. It's secure, rugged, reliable and cost effective.
Setting up a voting station will be very easy and will not require any skilled technician - just connect power cables and network ports. Moreover, the SunRay itself can be reused for its original purpose after the voting - a good cost saving. The total vote count would be instant - heck, a real-time vote count would be possible (although it would be debatable whether to allow it or not).
Power failure in the voting station won't affect the voting data - although it could prevent people from voting in that particular voting station. 
Security won't be a concern - since the sunray server doesn't need to talk to anyone but SunRays, and the data will be kept in the server. WanRay uses VPN to secure the connection, and I believe SunRay has its own encryption again over VPN, so it's quite secure. 



With various security and management features in Solaris 10, I can easily imagine using thousands of SunRays and a couple of SunRay servers as a secure and cost effective voting system - after all, our Trusted Solaris and SunRay are used for highly sensitive and secure environment, so why not use the same technology for voting ?


             (     Sep 08 2004, 09:46:49 AM PDT     )
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                I actually had a very similar idea, that I presented to my director.  She never got back to me about it, but I'm guessing that its something that Sun doesn't want to get involved in.  Ahh well

                

                Posted by
                                    Azeem Jiva
                
                on September 08, 2004 at 10:30 AM PDT

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                [Trackback] Here, I'd like to discuss a proposal for  a possible   java.net forum project  on a voting system that could be made available to school children to experiment with voting which includes a certain degree of formality and complexity. It will not only in...

                

                Posted by
                                    M. Mortazavi's Weblog
                
                on September 08, 2004 at 02:59 PM PDT

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                I did two Linuxinsider.com columns
( http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/34032 and
34185  on this. It's a great idea, but do you know
why Sun wasn't interested? because the FEC doesn't know enough about the sunray to issue an RFP asking for the solution - and there's no money in offering one without a client RFP. Grrrrrr.....


                

                Posted by
                                    Paul Murphy
                
                on September 15, 2004 at 02:27 PM PDT

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                The correct URLs for Paul's articles seem to be 

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/34032.html
and 

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/34185.html.
Interesting read. My colleague and I were quite sure some other people have already thought of the idea. And here's proof of that.



Anyway, I don't know why Sun isn't interested. My guess is that this isn't something Sun usually dooes - Sun usually provides technology and infrastructure solutions but not the application. Unless some company realizes this opportunity and implements a voting system with SunRay, I guess it's not likely to happen.


                

                Posted by
                                    Anonymous
                
                on September 16, 2004 at 09:23 AM PDT

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