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Thanks for the post. My belief WRT electronic voting is that if it is to be used at all, the machines' architecture and circuitry along with the software all need to be "open source". I'm pretty conservative, but proprietary code and/or hardware strikes me as open-season for hackers. The article Watchdog85 cites is Exhibit 'A' in the case for "open source". Publish the machine specs and code and let all the techies review. The machines would be constructed with basic, off-the-shelf components. The operating system would be Linux (DSL would do) or FreeBSD. Just ramblin', folks.

I would agree with you on that one. Proprietary code is no less prone to being buggy than open-source - in fact it may be more prone to being buggy - and serious hackers/crackers have the tools to render proprietary code more or less open-source as far as they are concerned, so using an open-source solution that has been rigorously tested by all and sundry who want to take a shot at it is more likely to be safer, all things considered, than some niche piece of proprietary code which, because it isn’t going to be a widely-sold product, will not get a huge amount of development or testing resources thrown at it.