Other alternatives

A natural approach to increasing voting system transparency would be first to tackle the most obscure aspect of the current system. The Federal testing process (discussed in §) is the most mysterious and critically obscure step in ensuring voting systems perform according to the federal standards for voting systems. We can infer from increased state-level certification requirements for voting systems that the evaluation process and the federal voting system standards do not ensure that a voting system can be used in elections without serious flaws slipping through.See, supra, §. (Ping says (I don't think this is important. -jlh): Can't infer this fact -- only that states feel they need more certification.) A first step in increasing the quality of the federal certification process would be to make the testing plans and full evaluation reports public, perhaps in redacted form.

Incentivized disclosure is another option. State governments or a consortium of state governments could decide to hold a contest or post a prize for the first development team to produce a voting system, like the ACT's eVACS, that would be released under a specified open source license. Another interesting model is that of ``community source'' where a consortium of government entities would agree to donate annual dues and full-time coders to a foundation that would develop, certify, market and support the consortium's voting systems.The SAKAI project uses this ``community source'' model, where a consortium of higher educational institutions have started to develop their own course management software instead of paying vendors . See: https://sakaiproject.org/.

Finally, there are technological mechanisms for increasing transparency of voting systems. For example, the move in many states to mandate that DRE voting systems produce a VVPAT is essentially public verification of a record independent of the larger system. This allows the customer to treat the larger voting system as a black box as there will always be a verified indelible record of each vote as cast. In this vein, there is a body of work being developed by researchers that narrows the scope and minimizes the amount of what has to be evaluated. Examples of this work include isolated vote storage systemsMolnar, D., Kohno, T., Sastry, N., And Wagner, D. Tamper-evident, history-independent, subliminal-free data structures on PROM storage -or - how to store ballots on a voting machine (extended abstract). In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2006)., voting systems with dramatically less trusted codeYee, K.-P., Wagner, D., Hearst, M., And Bellovin, S. Prerendered user interfaces for higher-assurance electronic voting. In USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (2006)., and hardware isolation techniques for security verificationSastry, N., Kohno, T., And Wagner, D. Designing voting machines for verification. In Fifteenth USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2006) (August 2006)..