James Turner interviews Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery and now member of the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission. She correctly states that open source voting machines weren’t a panacea. She’s absolutely right, but should grant the points she mentiones a greater weight: With open source machines, you cannot only have but also find software bugs. It would even be much harder to conceal malicious code.
At the hearing at the “Federal Constitutional Court” of Germany, one general issue with closed source machines has been stated. If you have a piece of (closed source) business software, you know the input, you know the output, and so you have a certain (though not perfect) control over what happens. Concerning voting machines, however, you have an unknown input, an unknown black box, and therefore you have no control concerning the output.
