Although I agree with the California Secretary of State that punchcard ballots are an unacceptable mechanism for holding an election, they are a dream compared to some of the new electronic voting systems being installed all over the country. Though they improve on punchcards in that they better insure that the votes initially recorded actually capture the voters' will, their tremendous vulnerabilities to tampering means that there is absolutely no guarantee that the votes will actually get counted correctly. (And it's the counting which was of such concern to the Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Salon recently ran an interview with Bev Harris, a writer who investigated Diebold's system, its technological vulnerabilities, and the political motivations which seem to be inhibiting Diebold from making appropriate and necessary corrections to their technology in order for it to be a legitimate medium for an election.
From a technological stanpoint, Diebold's system suffers from two major, substantive flaws: the databases storing these results are incredibly easy to be overwritten by anyone on the Internet, and there is no audit trail to either track nefarious changes via hacking or to provide a redundant paper record immune to tampering in the event of any discrepancies.
From a political standpoint, there are reasons to suspect that the company's reluctance to address these deficiencies is to permit them to be exploited by the political interests preferred by the company. This may be conjecture and not turn out to be the case at all, but memos from the company suggest the plausibility of the aforementioned suspicion. These memos have been published in a variety of places, places that Diebold has now served with Cease and Desist letters demanding their removal by claiming copyright on them. Of course, as Harris pointed out:
"...I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted."
Of course, as she also points out, their claiming copyright on them essentially also authenticates them as well. But where can one see these memos? It's become a giant shell game as the memos are passed around from mirror site to mirror site, trying to stay one step ahead of Diebold's lawyers. These are memos which need to be reviewed and questioned. Perhaps they are all innocuous and Diebold can easily explain them all away. If not, then every citizen has a right and obligation to review documents detailing how their right to vote is being deliberately undermined. With that knowledge citizens can demand redress (e.g., discontinuing use of the technology, prosecution of criminal parties, etc.) but without that knowledge citizens are sitting ducks to be exploited by those who would chose to. To protect criminal activity with the shield of copyright protection would be a great travesty and a complete abdication of any social value to copyright protection in the first place.
Of course, that's only part of the problem. As long as integral civic institutions are maintained through proprietary systems, citizens will forever be at the mercy of the motivations and limitations of those entities which produce them. Even without any nefarious intentions, a company's technology is limited to the finite brainpower of its workforce and its own fiscal self-interest. Closed off from the world, proprietary technologies' vulnerabilities will be accessible only to criminals whose respect for copyright protections would likely be as negligible as their respect for the other laws they would seek to flaunt with their exploitation.
Governments need to add their voice to the chorus clamoring for open source solutions to modern institutional problems. Only with that visibility can citizens be sure they can know how it works and depend on the combined intellect of the world to address defects. To use proprietary solutions for such integral civic operations is, in fact, unprecedented. In any other civic work, plans are filed as public documents. Image a bridge where the blueprints are protected as proprietary company property, reviewable by no one. "Don't worry about it," the company says. "The bridge will stand up. Trust us."
We wouldn't trust the bridge builder, so why would we trust the technology vendor?