In what appears to be an industry first, Sequoia Voting Systems announced Tuesday plans to publish the source code of their latest voting machine.
The company said it will publically release the code for their new Frontier Election System in November.
“I think Sequoia is recognizing that it won’t do anymore to just urge people to trust them,” said Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten, “and that people want to know that the code that controls these machines is open and that experts have had a full chance to look at it.”
Sequoia, like most other voting companies, has been reluctant to reveal to the public exactly how their machines work. From the Wired article:
The company has long had a reputation for vigorously fighting any efforts by academics, voting activists and others to examine the source code in its proprietary systems, and even threatened to sue Princeton University computer scientists if they disclosed anything learned from a court-ordered review of its software.
However, pressure has been mounting on the secretive company after allegations of voting irregularities, and the introduction of a competing, open source solution by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.
If anything is open source and fully transparent to the public, shouldn’t it be our voting machines?