voting and open source

When I look at the most recent election, it becomes very clear that one of the main problems with electronic voting machines (besides needing a paper trail) is that the voting machines and software are owned by private companies. Many of those private companies are run by people who are very partisan in their views (and often Republican). This is from a Mother Jones column about Diebold.

...they wonder why state officials seem so unconcerned by the fact that the two companies in line to sell touch-screen voting machines to Ohio have deep and continuing ties to the Republican Party.

So I did a google on "voting software" +"open source" and was amazed at how many people are working on this. The next step is to convince legislators that it is better to have voting software that can be scrutinized by the public rather than secret software being developed by people whose agendas are unclear.

To find out who your congressman is you can go here and you can find your senators here. I plan on writhing all three this week about this issue.