VotingWorks open-source voting bet won real elections and passed a state audit

Voting machines in the US run on software voters never see. The three vendors that dominate the market — Dominion, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic — treat their code as intellectual property, and that closed 'black box' has fed conspiracy theories about rigged elections. New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan wanted a way for people to see how ballots were actually counted.

Ben Adida, who wrote his MIT PhD on securing voting systems, concluded that open-source software was the only effective answer. In 2018 he returned to the problem and founded VotingWorks as a nonprofit, reasoning that the structure would change the incentives of election vendors. The machines' code could be inspected by anyone, and the design stayed familiar — hand-marked or touchscreen paper ballots and an 'I Voted' sticker — so voters would not be put off.

Mississippi was the first state to use the machines, in 2019. On November 8, 2022, about 3,000 voters in three small New Hampshire towns ran their ballots through VotingWorks devices, and the same ballots were hand-counted in a public session in Concord so anyone could check whether the machines had recorded the votes correctly.

A January 2023 audit by the Secretary of State's office found the software worked well: in the audited towns, tallies matched hand counts within one or two votes per race. Hardware was the weak spot — a scanner obstruction kept one machine out of use on Election Day and a paper jam briefly troubled another — but the software itself had counted accurately.

Open-source VotingWorks machines ran real elections in Mississippi from 2019 and New Hampshire in 2022; audits matched tallies to hand counts within 1-2 votes per race.

Three vendors' closed, proprietary code made vote counting a black box that conspiracy theories could fill.

Adida made the code public so anyone, or an expert they hired, could inspect how ballots were counted in real time.

Going nonprofit changed vendor incentives instead of only the software.

Familiar paper-ballot design kept voters comfortable with the new machines.

Public hand counts gave the pilot an independent check beyond the machines' own tally.

When distrust comes from a process nobody can inspect, open the mechanism to independent audit and remove the seller's conflict of interest: transparency, not messaging, restores credibility.

New Hampshire has not adopted open-source machines: the Ballot Law Commission, not the secretary of state, decides which devices towns may use, and there is no timeline to replace the aging AccuVote machines. VotingWorks remains the only open-source contender in that review and already runs elections in several Mississippi counties. The company framed the New Hampshire pilot as one step in a wider move toward transparent voting — an Alaska bill had proposed requiring open-source election code — and the audit left the open question as hardware reliability, not software trust.