Wisconsin Voting Machines
Here’s an impressive piece of common sense:
Among the 15 bills governor Jim Doyle signed into law on Wednesday will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source.
Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used.
Any voting machines to be used in the state already had to pass State Elections Board tests. Electronic voting machines, in particular, already were required to maintain their results tallies even if the power goes out, and to produce paper ballots that could be used in case of a recount. The new law also requires the paper ballots to be presented to voters for verification before being stored.
I wrote about electronic voting here (2004), here (2003), and here (2000).
ARL • January 6, 2006 7:37 AM
The paper ballot part has great value. Having to provide the public source code does just about nothing. The source code should be available to the state and to the courts if demanded in a trial.
I can see the price for such machines going way up as the vendor has to take into consideration the cost of sending source code to every requestor.