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Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Voting’
October 28th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
E-Vote Software Maker to Disclose Source Code

For those concerned with the integrity of electronic ballots, the announcement by one of the leading providers of e-voting software should be welcome news. According to Wired.com, Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system.

The company’s new public source optical-scan voting system, called Frontier Election System, will be submitted for federal certification and testing in the first quarter of next year. The code will be released for public review in November, the company said, on its web site. Sequoia’s proprietary, closed systems are currently used in 16 states and the District of Columbia.”

The decision to disclose was reached after protracted negotiations and litigation with critics who charged that Sequoia’s vote tallies often counted more votes than ballots cast. Of course, as anyone familiar with elections will attest, accurately tabulating election results is a perpetual problem. But getting the “bugs” worked out of a computer system will go a long way towards avoiding the recurrence of Ballot Box 13 and other cases of deliberate fraud.