It’s not just the national and statewide election results that are threatened by poor software. Local school district results are endangered too:
“A company that sells and operates vote-counting machines made a mistake programming the machine that tabulated the results of the Monadnock Regional School District election March 14.”
Fortunately, the machine was counting paper ballots so once the glitch was caught, the ballots could be re-run. However, if the vote had been paperless, there might be no way to recapture the initial selections. We need to be awfully careful as we automate voting that both innocent mistakes, as this appeared to be, and malicious tampering isn’t allowed. Publishing the software, vetting and auditing it and the results are necessary. Few processes should be more transparent than voting.