If ever there was a need for the transparency that open source software brings it is in the realm of voting machine technology. This story makes that point crystal clear. There may or may not be shenanigans going on in Ohio. The point is that we have no way of knowing what the patches on those Ohio voting machines actually do, and no faith in the code reading, debugging, and auditing ability of elected officials. If we want to be confident in the workings of our democracy, closed-source voting machines should be banned.
For that matter, why aren’t voting systems required to leave a physical paper trail so that we can check up on the tabulating algorithms?
