Comment by George Showman (Voter)

This is just so crucial. I think Verified Voting says it well: "All computer systems are subject to subtle errors. Moreover, computer systems can malfunction or be deliberateley corrupted at any stage of their design, manufacture, and use. The methods used to do this can be extremely difficult to foresee and detect. Therefore, it is crucial to the integrity of elections that voting systems provide a means of recording and recovering voter intent that does not depend on the reliability of software." There is nothing LESS transparent than software code. Its opacity has two levels: 1. Only 'experts' (programmers) can make sense of the code at all (i.e. 'read' it), in most cases. 2. Those experts almost all agree that hidden bugs (Verified Voting's "subtle errors", or, more relevantly, unintended consequences) are _inevitable_ in code. Voting system software probably has tens of thousands of lines of code at least. That is a lot of opportunity for error (see various industry estimates of how many bugs arise on average in X lines of code...). As a former software developer, I know very well how bugs can go undetected for years before certain fringe scenarios arise to trigger a malfunction. Why introduce this uncertainty into our democratic process, especially when creating 'software-independent' systems is relatively easy to do?