Why aren't voting machines open source? [closed]

Answer 1

So far, most replies have been technical in nature, but most likely, voting machines are not open source because the company under contract to develop them has no incentive to make them open source.

If a company develops an open source voting system, anyone came come around later to support that system. And, quite honestly, I doubt the government would accept the equivalent of a SourceForge project as the basis for an entire election.

Perhaps there should be an honest-broker authority that oversees the development of an open-source voting system, and contributors to that system should be vetted before they can view or commit source code.

Answer 2

• The people responsible have a "security by obscurity" bad meme stuck somewhere
• The people building the software don't want to help competitors
• The people building the software fear embarrassment
• There are not enough people in the legislative process who understand the flaws in all of the above

Answer 3

In Belgium, the sourcecode for the voting machines is freely downloadable.

Answer 4

There is no specific reason not to open-source the software (and even opening the hardware-layout) of voting machines. It has no security impact, as some try to state, because if closed or open source, the ROM can be switched. The machine need some sort of verifier to check, if the code loaded is really the one certified for the election. Open-Sourcing would make no difference.

Answer 5

Because if they were they would not be able to blame inaccurate votes on calibration-errors on the touchscreen.

Answer 6

The reason they aren't open source, is because, as Kent mentioned, it wouldn't help. You could open source the code. But there's no way to ensure that the voting machine you are using is actually running the code that is open sourced.