Reply #4: FL: House Seat Hangs by a Byte

[EFerrari]

House Seat Hangs by a Byte

By Kim Zetter| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jan, 11, 2007

As the 110th Congress settles into the Capitol building this month, one congressman won't be able to get too comfortable in his chair, with a controversy over the electronic voting machines that put him in office boiling down to a battle over the source code.

Republican Vern Buchanan claimed Florida's 13th Congressional District seat last November by fewer than 400 votes, while some 18,000 ballots cast in Sarasota County mysteriously contained no vote either for Buchanan or his Democratic opponent Christine Jennings -- an anomaly that prompted Jennings to challenge the election results in a lawsuit against state election officials, Buchanan and the company that makes the machines.

The case brings to a head a long-running tug of war over how to handle the software code that increasingly runs U.S. elections. Advocates for transparent elections, including voting activists and some candidates, have sought to examine the source code for election software to ensure that machines are accurately presenting the ballots, recording and counting every vote. On the other side, voting machine companies like Election Systems & Software and Diebold Election Systems have consistently claimed their source code is a trade secret, a position to which U.S. courts have generally deferred.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72452-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1