The whole thing was hashed out on Slashdot
www.slashdot.org something like six months ago, around the primaries, and the general opinion was that *none* of all the techies who hang out there, and this is one of *the* most popular techie Web sites), liked or trusted this whole deal...since the company claimed that its code that actually ran the machines was 'trade secret", and so not open to public scrutiny. The issue from many years ago, of the mechanical voting machines that were fixed to alter the vote, was brought up.

I agree with the consensus, that calling this a "trade secret" is about as acceptable in a putative democratic republic is more than slightly suspect. For that matter, as a computer professional with over 20 years of experience in the field, I would venture to suggest that I
could rough out the code to add buttons pushed on a screen in an afternoon, and have a finished product within a week or two...and that's under 80 man-hours. Given that, I see nothing that they could possibly
*want* to be a trade secret...unless it was tweaked in illegal ways.

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Mark
Unix/Linux systems administrator & software developer