This news is comin out of the primary elections that are happening in PA this week. You would think that a little testing would have been done to catch things like this. This doesn’t look good for the people running the election, and looks especially bad for Dominion. At a minimum, most Republicans are going to be spring loaded to yell “FRAUD!” and probably some independents as well. The whole story is at WNEP:

Some voting locations are reporting that when Republicans go up to the machine to vote, an introduction screen says “Official Democratic Ballot.”

The judge of elections at a polling place in Kingston Township said he paused voting Tuesday morning until this was addressed. He said election officials in Wilkes-Barre told him this is a typo and when voters go to the next screen, the republican ballot loads. They also cross-checked it with an emergency Republican paper ballot to be sure.

When registered Republicans went to vote, after poll workers pulled up their ballots, the welcome screen said, “Official Democratic Ballot.” This made Republican voters uneasy, but elections officials tell us it had nothing to do with the legitimacy of the votes. They call it a coding error.

Coding error huh? Fancy that. That is the issue that a lot of people have with voting machines in general. You can’t just open up the box and look at the code. Even if you could make an image of the actual software running on the box, it is probably in what is called a compiled format. It isn’t readable after it has been turned into something for the processor to operate on.

If you want to see the actual commands that got decomposed into machine code, you need to get the source files. A lot of companies deem that as being intellectual property, so they can keep the government coming back for fixes or updates.  This is the reason a lot of defense contracts stipulate that the government owns the source code as well as the finished product. That way they can see if there are any back doors or generally adverse code. They could even maintain it themselves if they wanted to pay for the expertise.

Another alternative is to go open source. This means that the code is out in the open for everyone to poke around in. Some people think this is a bad idea, but it usually turns out to be the opposite. Bugs that could be overlooked by a small team often get fleshed out pretty quickly. Another benefit is that nobody can hide anything nefarious.