James Reddick and Dina Temple-Raston
Next week, three towns in New Hampshire will embark on a grand electoral experiment, Click Here and The Record have learned. On November 8, the Granite State will pilot a new kind of voting machine that will use open-source software – software that everyone can examine – to tally the votes.
“There’s a strong desire to see how ballot counting machines are actually counting the ballots,” New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, David Scanlan, told Click Here in an interview. “And open-source software really is the only way that you can do that effectively.”
The software that runs voting machines is typically distributed in a kind of black box – like a car with its hood sealed shut. Because the election industry in the U.S. is dominated by three companies – Dominion, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic – the software that runs their machines is private. The companies consider it their intellectual property and that has given rise to a roster of unfounded conspiracy theories about elections and their fairness.