YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

The real motive is your latter point, to capture evergreen money through government spending. Trying to find opportunities to be the vendor of choice in new ways.

IMO there's no such thing as a secure digital voting system. Complexity is how vulnerabilities and exploits get into in-use systems. You want things as simple and obvious as possible, and that means using and counting physical objects of some sort.

After all, it's much easier to notice a hundred thousand pieces of paper getting added to the vote-counting system than flipping some bits that represent a hundred thousand votes.

The voting system definitely needs improvement, but a digital app is absolutely not the way to go. Vote-by-mail solves nearly all the issues you've brought up, and seems to me to be a good intermediate step.

Municipal Government Employee here (from a top 15 US city).

Municipal & State IT systems (particularly around cyber-security) are atrocious (See Atlanta, Baltimore Ransomware). Many of our (and our peers') systems are a hodgepodge of paper, excel sheets, legacy systems, and new off the shelf systems.

At the end of the day, government maintains a strong role in the operations of cities, counties, and states. For example, our city manages the issuance of more than 250,000 permits annually, a road network of more than 10,000 lane miles, and an annual capital infrastructure budget of nearly $1 billion.

There is a very real need for better IT systems that can be customized to meet the needs of differing legacy systems and data structures by municipalities. If our city is any indication of the industry, there is an insane amount of waste and mismanagement that can be attributed to poor/legacy systems or data.

When people think they're "drawing attention to systemic issues of [someone else's] mindset", what they're usually doing is generalizing from their own limited perspective, rooted in their own identity and emotions. Underlying this kind of generalization, usually, is a desire to give expression to one's identity in opposition to what one experiences as the opposite identity. When people do this, it mostly comes across as a slap to the other side.

We don't mean to do that—on the contrary, we think we're helpfully pointing out information that other people need in order to improve themselves (which in most cases means, be more like us). But the other side feels it acutely. We don't see or feel the shadow we cast when arguing like this, but it's the first thing the other picks up on. Then the impulse becomes irresistible to fling it back—which the first person experiences as being misunderstood and unfairly interpreted—and so we get fights where people are no longer exchanging information or learning from each other. I believe that this may be, in the small, the same phenomenon which in the large is known as war.

So my recommendation would be: don't do it. But if you have to do it, hold off until you've conscientiously searched for unhelpful signals in what you've written and unhelpful intentions that may be lurking in your feelings. Take care to give space to the other side and to allow for how your own biases affect your view of the other. (If you want to look into the latter, one place might be with the feeling behind that word "gratingly".) On HN, there's an additional don't-do-it: don't do it if it would take a thread on a generic tangent. Those lead to much lower-quality (high indignation, low information) discussions.

All that is so hard that it's better just to not go there. Instead spend the energy on processing why one feels the need to go there in the first place—especially on the internet, where misunderstanding is on a hair trigger and human bandwidth so painfully low.

I've tried so many times to work with government entities. It's a complete mess. It seems the only people who want to fix the problems don't work there or are fine with the problems.