Some counties in Mississippi have decided to move away from traditional voting machines and voting software from large companies and instead switched to machines maintained by a nonprofit organization whose goal is to make the voting process more transparent.

VotingWorks, a nonprofit founded in 2018, initially deployed some of its voting machines in five counties in the Magnolia State, making rural Mississippi among the first in the country to purchase this type of voting machine and use “open source” software. The organization now works with about 14 counties in Mississippi to handle election-related business.

Choctaw County was one of the few counties nationwide to first embrace the message of the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization.

County Clerk Amy Burdine told Mississippi Today that she and the Choctaw County Election Commission recommended the county board purchase equipment from VotingWorks because it is cost-effective, transparent and produces a paper ballot.

Burdine and other county officials initially tested some of the voting machines in a few precincts in the county. After proving that the machines worked effectively, the county expanded the machines and deployed them in all precincts.

The company differentiates itself from other established voting software companies by disclosing everything on its website, from its donors and financial information to the prices of its machines. VotingWorks machines are also made from off-the-shelf electronics and are cheaper in the long run than other voting machines.

Ben Adida, co-founder of VotingWorks, told Mississippi Today that open source software is actually more secure than software from traditional companies that closely guard their proprietary software.

The reason for this, he says, is that publicly available source code can be examined by anyone, and the more people examine something, the greater the chance of discovering bugs. In particular, the Department of Defense and other federal agencies are beginning to use open source software.

Transparent software and user-friendly voting machines are essential to restoring trust in voting machines and could lead to restoring confidence in election results, says Adida.

“Anyone who holds elections expects the elections to be transparent,” said Adida. “People have a right to understand how their votes are counted and how their democracy works.”

At the polling place, voters mark their ballot by hand or using an accessible ballot marking device and cast their vote using an optical scanner. When a question comes from the voting machine, local officials can access the ballots to verify the results.