I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don’t believe the outcome. Why don’t they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?
Importantly, Open Source is not feasible as a safeguard because there would be no way of verifying that the voting machine is running a build from the public source.
Even if it was the same source, you would have to also verify the compiler was not compromised. There are a lot of steps that need to be done.
That being said, open source would reveal the big easy to implement bugs and design flaws, as well as boost trust in the system. They should open up the source and allow audits.
This is a solveable problem, actually. It involves trusted computing platforms where various unrelated parties commit to various audit standards.
It could still, in theory, be compromised, but it would be a a lot harder to rig than anything at have today, since one would need a deep backdoor into multiple separate entities - the hosting company, and the source code repository, and the voting machine manufacturer, etc.