The idea of closed software for voting machines is a scary concept. Like crypto software you want to make sure as many people as possible are looking at the guts of your software and poking holes in it. Otherwise the possibility of manipulation, and unintentional mistakes altering the vote, are high. Of course there are those who argue that this is intentional but lets assume for the sake of argument, they are just being paranoid.
Case in point, Ed Felton, a Princeton University computer scientist, was asked to investigate why the voting machine tally, in Pennsauken District 6, indicated 1 additional vote then was actually recorded and reported by the county clerk. The clerks numbers came from the memory card, the machine tally from a paper tape. In this case the tape showed 95 votes for Obama vs the 94 recorded by the clerk. (H/T to Wired Threat Level for this one)
Sequoia and Diebold have both threatened legal action against academic institutions if they attempt to reverse engineer their code. Deborah Bowen state senator from California has been a vocal proponent of greater viability in the electronic voting systems. First publishing numerous papers regarding the insecurity of the electronic voting machines under review in her districts and also in speeches to her district.
"You cannot maintain a democracy where a significant number of people have doubts about the legitimacy of an election," Bowen said. She criticized Secretary of State McPherson for certifying on Feb. 17 voting systems made by Diebold Election Systems of Canton, Ohio, whose CEO made campaign contributions to the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.
"This is not a company we ought to be doing business with," she said.
Conflicts of interest, she said, abound throughout the voting system, including the ways in which ballots are processed, counted and verified, and in partisan oversight of the system.
From Bowen slams voting systems in S.C. speech
What can you do? Write your local congressmen and secretary of state, and take a look at the Open Voting Consortium.. This is a group dedicated to producing free open source voting software.
