California Secretary of State Debra Bowen argued last week that open source software can help fix some of the flaws in electronic voting systems, which have proliferated throughout the country since the 2000 election, yet been criticized as unreliable. Software that designs ballots and operates electronic voting machines would benefit from more scrutiny Bowen said during a panel discussion on e-voting at EmTech, the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. As secretary of state, she can examine the code of proprietary software under nondisclosure agreements, but privileged information about voting-software flaws is not easily accessed by the public or many county workers given the job of purchasing voting machines, she said.
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