When you have your own system you know you can rely on most of it and when you have written a program in house you can be fairly certain that the source code you have is the code that generated the executable. You also know exactly where it will be installed.
In the case of voting machines there will be several polling stations in all of the around 3,000 counties all of which will need to have an executable file of some kind. How can you guarantee that every one will get exactly what they should?
Add in that the circuit boards inside the computer may have been corrupted. How would checking the code help? What if someone had hidden some code on a disk and then flagged the sector as unusable. The OS would never tell you about it. What if the insertion of a USB drive to collect the results triggered a program on the drive that changed the results.
Did you check all the drivers that were installed? What about the dll files (assuming Windows). Other operating systems have equivalents.
Did any of your programs include images? You can hide code in those after the end of the image data. Did you check the compiler to make sure that it did not add anything it shouldn't? Or interpreter or assembler. The possibilities are endless and that is why I would never trust them.
When you have your own system you know you can rely on most of it and when you have written a program in house you can be fairly certain that the source code you have is the code that generated the executable. You also know exactly where it will be installed.
In the case of voting machines there will be several polling stations in all of the around 3,000 counties all of which will need to have an executable file of some kind. How can you guarantee that every one will get exactly what they should?
Add in that the circuit boards inside the computer may have been corrupted. How would checking the code help? What if someone had hidden some code on a disk and then flagged the sector as unusable. The OS would never tell you about it. What if the insertion of a USB drive to collect the results triggered a program on the drive that changed the results.
Did you check all the drivers that were installed? What about the dll files (assuming Windows). Other operating systems have equivalents.
Did any of your programs include images? You can hide code in those after the end of the image data. Did you check the compiler to make sure that it did not add anything it shouldn't? Or interpreter or assembler. The possibilities are endless and that is why I would never trust them.