SCO Saves the Day?

Okay, there is a headline I never expected to write! But stay with me for this twisted bit of logic. On NPR this morning, there was a report that a U.S. Senator from Michigan was calling for the seizing of voting machines in a nearby Ohio county. Presumably, this is because he feels there is evidence that the machines (electronic voting machines, I'm assuming) might have been tampered with. And of course, this highlights the problems with receipt-less voting machines - how do you prove fraud, especially without records or a whistle-blower?

Then it struck me, the recent furor over SCO and Linux might provide the answer. And here's how: in response to SCO's claims that Linux appropriated sections of SCO's Unix while failing to provide examples, many third-party developers have built utilities which compare the code of a Linux build against an available SCO Unix build. Much like the "Find" feature on your computer, it scans the separate codes looking for and comparing similarities. At least that's what the developers promise.

So why can't the same kinds of programs be used or developed for catching voter machine tampering? I mean, you could just have the program scan the suspected machine against a "control" machine that hasn't been tampered with, and then examine the inconsistencies? While it may not tell us what a true vote count SHOULD have been, it would give us a quick and handy way to see if machines have been changed after the factory. Of course, it also doesn't cover conspiracies from the factories themselves, but nothing is perfect.

So developers unite - help show whether we can trust our current voting technologies. Oh, and while you're at it, could you graft a receipt printer on from the local grocery store - there's no reason for an ATM to be more sophisticated and user-friendly than a voting machine, is there?