The ruling in FL-13 that allowing review of the source code for voting machines demonstrates a rather impressive degree of ignorance on the part of the judge.

He says that opening up the source would reveal "trade secrets" and therefore it would not be permitted.

We're talking about vote counting software here. There had better not be any trade secrets involved. There's nothing difficult or involved about counting up votes by ones, one voter at a time.

In fact, a condition for awarding the bid to a vendor of electronic voting machines should be that the code is delivered as open source, so that it can be reviewed by anybody, and any errors detected and corrected.

Better yet, decouple the purchase of the machines from the creation of the software. Get a price per machine from different vendors, then outsource the software development, with the state government owning and publishing the code that is developed. It is antithetical to a voting process that the counting method not be transparent.

All that said, paper ballots are best, and mail in ballots best of all.