http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=2585
Wisconsin Technology Network
By WTN News • 01/04/06
Madison, Wis. — Among the 15 bills governor Jim Doyle signed
into law on Wednesday will require the software of touch-screen voting machines
used in elections have its source code opened up to public viewing.
Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are
responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used.
Any voting machines to be used in the state already had to
pass State Elections Board tests. Electronic voting machines, in particular,
already were required to maintain their results tallies even if the power goes
out, and to produce paper ballots that could be used in case of a recount. The
new law also requires the paper ballots to be presented to voters for
verification before being stored.
But of this bill's provisions, perhaps the more influential
in a wider sense is the requirement that municipalities provide source code,
and the more general condition that "the coding for the software that is
used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly
accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability
of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election."
The bill passed the Assembly 91-4 and the Senate 29-2.
A federal Governmet Accountability Office report released in
September 2005 said that specific makes of electronic voting machines
nationwide have been found to store both vote tallies and audit logs in an
unencrypted form that could be altered without detection and that some vendors
installed uncertified versions of voting software in some machines.
These reports came from individual election officials, and
there was not a definite consensus, the report said, but there were enough
cases of lost votes in real elections that the GAO recommended stricter
policies and rules for election machines.
Link: Assembly Bill 627