Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday — a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems.

Many states are hastily implementing flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures.

A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen argued Thursday that open source software can help fix some of the flaws in electronic voting systems, which have proliferated throughout the country since the 2000 election yet been criticized as unreliable.

In theory, open source programming of voting machines would remove their veils of secrecy. In practice, though, using open source may not be a viable option if code is not made available. However, a formal effort to work on open source code for voting machines could come at any time from anyone.

Electronic voting machines vendor Election Systems & Software Inc. has finally given in to demands by California's Secretary of State office that it submit the source code used in one of its products. But it made it abundantly clear it is unhappy about the requirement.

Unverifiable paperless voting systems are still considered normal in many states; The software that counts our votes is secret proprietary property of Diebold, Sequoia, et al; The system is unnecessarily difficult to use (or impossible to use) for citizens with disabilities; Election judges still strain to divine voter intent on a significant percentage of ballots

See Alan Dechert from the Open Voting Consortium talks about the importance of changing the voting system.

According to major newspapers, starting with the municipal elections of 2008, Brazil’s e-voting machines will use the Linux operating system, to be developed by the technical team of the federal elections tribunal the TSE. According to the TSE’s IT division, the advantages of using Linux in the electronic voting machine are standardization, since it is possible to use this OS in all models of the device, as well as transparency, since this is an open mcchanism in which all the source code is available to the public and can be freely audited. Another advantage is zero cost, because no license fees must be paid.