Voting: The Perfect Use Of Open Source Software?

State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach) is advocating the idea of using open source software for voting machines. She's the chair of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, which held a hearing on the topic today (Feb 8, 2006). Elections might be an ideal use of this technology.

What is open source? Most software that you buy is compiled, meaning that the code is written in a form that only a computer can understand. With open source software, the code that runs on the computer is still (usually) compiled, but you also get a copy of the source code, the human-readable instructions written by the programmer(s).

If you have the source code, you have complete transparency into what the code is actually doing. In the wider world, people value open source because it allows them to edit programs to suit their own purposes, or to fix bugs.

But in the world of elections, a world that features that fishy smell emanating from the two elections of George W. Bush, open source is valuable not because you want to edit the code, but because you want to see just what the heck is going on.