EVMs again, in a real democracy...

http://www.greatandhra.com/ganews/viewnews.php?id=14612&cat=&scat=16

Not sure how terribly accurate that virtually unknown newpaper is, but a shorter version is at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/EVMs-can-be-easily-tweaked-Expert/articleshow/4739375.cms -- presumably an NYTimes style pay site or the dead-tree version would have the extra details that the greatandhra site shows.

The summary: some of the other political parties have been complaining that the EVMs can indeed be tampered with, and the EC (Election Commission) is looking into it very seriously, calling for meetings with officials of the two "public sector" companies (that's a phrase that basically means "majority owned by the government", although they do also trade on the stock markets like any other company), etc.

Even with no details of the "exploit", I feel very good about this.  Look at how they're handling it, compared to the Diebold situation in the US.  What I said in http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0412.html#11 still stands -- the entities are public sector companies, and the EC is quite independent.  (Hopefully even with the current Election Commissioner, Naveen Chawla, being a corrupt Sonia Gandhi/Congress party lackey)

In the US, as far as I recall, things had to go to court before anyone could see how the damn things worked.

And even then, it wasn't the political parties who went to court (again, as far as I remember, please correct me in comments if I'm wrong) it was the EFF or something like that.  Another sign that an essentially 2-party system is not quite democratic enough.

Yes, a true multi-party system is much more chaotic, but as a friend of mine said, maybe it is easier to "fix" things when the number of players is small.

And oh by the way, a "true multi party system" is a common enough state of affairs in the open source world too.  Coincidence?  I think not!