New Jersey voting machines subpoenaed for testing
A New Jersey state judge has subpoenaed county clerks in six NJ counties to turn over voting machines. Brief AP story here. Sequoia voting systems, the vendor, plans to fight the subpoena. The plaintiff in the case plans to have the machines tested by voting system researcher Ed Felten. Here is his summary of the discrepancies.
Sequoia is pushing back, claiming that their trade secrets will be violated, but they probably object in particular to the choice of Felten (see here for a little bit of the history between Sequoia and Felten).
Voting systems should be available for public scrutiny and testing. The argument that the secrecy is mandatory to protect the company’s intellectual property is a fallacy and a smokescreen - a good IP lawyer should be able to design terms by which the design is transparent for independent testing purposes but not permitted to be used for commercial development. Such terms would not meet the full definition of Open Source as defined by the Open Source Initiative, but they would still enable a much greater level of transparency and scrutiny than is currently permitted. Of course, that’s probably why the existing vendors resist such an approach - because their systems cannot stand up to the scrutiny.