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The companies tell a different story, pointing out that they do disclose their code to certain entities, including third-party firms and independent labs that work on behalf of the federal government to test for vulnerabilities in the software that could be exploited by hackers. “For a vendor to sue to prevent auditable paper records from being used in voting shows that market dynamics can be starkly misaligned with the public interest,” concluded a report by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Verified Voting, a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, works to promote “the responsible use of technology in elections.” In 2017, Hart InterCivic sued Texas to prevent counties from replacing its machines, which don’t produce a paper trail, with machines that did. Legacy vendors also fight to maintain their market share. Only 0.2 percent of voters have their ballots counted by hand. About 5 percent use direct recording electronic systems, or DREs, which allows votes to be cast and stored directly on the machine.
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A quarter of voters mark their ballots using machines (aptly named “ballot-marking devices”), which are then fed into an optical scanner as well. This process is how roughly two-thirds of the country votes. After a New Hampshire voter fills in a paper ballot by hand, it’s most likely inserted into an optical scanner, which interprets and tallies the marks. That August day in Concord, VotingWorks and two of the legacy vendors, Dominion and ES&S, were offering the same kind of product: an optical scanner, which is essentially just a counting machine. That leaves election administrators dependent on machines to tally up votes. Last year, for example, one county in Arizona estimated that counting all 105,000 ballots from the 2020 election would require at least 245 people working every day, including holidays, for almost three weeks. But doing so is prohibitively slow and expensive, not to mention more error-prone. Some conservative activists have suggested simply avoiding machines altogether and hand-counting ballots. “All the source code is public for the world to see, because why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software at all?” “An open-source voting system is one where there are no secrets about how this works,” Adida told the audience. But VotingWorks co-founder Ben Adida says it’s fundamental to rebuilding trust in voting equipment and combatting the nationwide push to hand count ballots. “If the FBI was building a new building, they're not going to put the blueprints out online,” he said. "Why in 2023 are we counting votes with any proprietary software at all?”Īt the Concord event, a representative for ES&S suggested that this open-source approach could be dangerous. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi.