Wisconsin requires open source voting

In addition to requiring that all electronic voting machines used in the state keep a verifiable paper trail as well as voting tallies even in the event of a power outage, a bill Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle signed into law today requires 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." While not truly open source—voting software vendors will presumably retain all rights to their code—this is excellent news for verifiable elections.

Tags: election, Jim Doyle, law, open source, opensource, voting, voting machines, wisconsin