Yes, releasing the EVM source code could improve our polling system’s security

livemint.com:

This year, as with nearly every recent election, questions were raised about the functioning of electronic voting machines (EVMs). While the Supreme Court upheld their use in elections, when asked if the source code of EVM machines could be released for open source use, it tersely shut down that line of argument, pointing out that if the source code is released, it would be misused. While I have no desire to wade into the debate over whether and how electronic voting machines should be used, I do want to unpack the Supreme Court’s somewhat offhand rejection of open source.

This is a line of thinking I’ve come up against time and again in my dealings with the government, and, for the life of me, I cannot understand where it comes from. As far as I can tell, there is a belief among the powers-that-be that source code is some sort of an access pass that gives anyone who gets hold of it the power to do whatever they want with the digital systems that have been built with it. All it will take to compromise a digital system, they seem to believe, is access to its source code—which is why there is such a concerted effort in government circles to keep it a secret.

As anyone who builds digital systems will tell you, this is simply not true. Source code merely explains how a system works. But just because you know how it works doesn’t mean you will be able to access it, much less get it to do what you want.

Take Signal, for example, an open-source messaging app that ensures that messages sent to anyone using its protocol are encrypted end-to-end. Even though its source code is publicly accessible, without access to the private decryption keys specific to that messaging session, it is impossible to decrypt the messages. With