[ Thanks to Roy Lanek for this
link. ]
“Recently the New York Times carried an article by David Pogue
endorsing what he called ‘open-source’ voting machines–electronic
voting machines running on software anyone can share and modify.
The term ‘open-source’ comes from the open source movement, a
software development methodology which encourages wider
dissemination of a computer program’s source code (the
human-readable version of a program) so that bugs can be fixed
faster and with less cost by leveraging the talent of the world’s
programmers. The sentiment Pogue’s article expresses is laudable
even if all the details in the article are specious–we do need
voting machines we can trust and we need them before we run
elections.“However, you can’t make voting machines more trustworthy by
making source code to them available. The benefits for sharing and
modifying voting machine source code lie elsewhere. The situation
with voting machines (and any other publicly-used computer) is
different than for computers which you control (like a home
computer at your home)…”