Voting machine integrity through transparency

Most voting machine purchases were done on individual basis by people were told to get
something to comply with Federal Law but without the tools to figure out if they were getting
things good or not. I know for the elections in 2006.. the money to buy the required
electronic voting items came in 5 weeks before the drop dead date of getting the machines into
the state. They were given a customary test of "does the dummy light work. Yes. do they put in
the items we laid out, good. Do they collect my 5-10 votes that I put in.. good. Onto the
polls." And then they were put into storage after the election because the funding to pay for
the testers etc only goes for 2 weeks after the elections. Then they were pulled out for the
next elections.

To abuse my analogy and your extension of it.. a bit further. If you only used your washer or
dryer every 2 years.. would you know that it was taking longer? Voting doesn't happen every
week or every day like the ski resort or my washing machine analogy. It is a process that
shows up and in most elections are not decided by little margins.. so if you have a 0.1%-5%
mis-tally it doesn't matter and might never be caught. It is only a problem to the majority of
people when you have to worry about every vote. When the margin of error is greater than the
difference in vote tally's.

I will also disagree about the government view... having been at the end of a government audit
or two. People in government do like accuracy.... The problem is what they are told be
accurate about is not what most people consider important until they don't win an election.

What do we citizens yell the most about to the government: 
1) Keep our taxes low, 
2) Make sure that the roads, schools, sewage, phones, electricity, social security checks for
grandma, etc are paid. 

Those things are watched as closely as possible. The IRS and various IG's are actually highly
accurate for an organization keeping track of things on nearly 40 year computers. That local
pork barrel project your Senator/Congressman/Parliament member brought home? Every cent is
going through 2-3 auditors hands to make sure that none of it is mis-spent beyond what
Congress/Parliament said it should. Yes there is some corruption going on, but the lack of
finding it is limited in the number of people you can hire to keep it going. The number of
auditors is at the point of diminishing returns.. you hire more auditors, require more
paperwork to be triple checked and the cost of the government goes up. 

Outsource it to contract agencies shows a lower cost initially.. until people find that
someone cheated.. and then you have to hire more auditors to watch the contractor who is now
filing more paperwork to keep track of things so their cost goes up.. and you end up in nearly
the same boat (sometimes it remains cheaper.. sometimes it gets more expensive.. it all
depends on how much you are willing in a 1 billion dollar contract to find 1 million dollars
in corruption. Most of the time, the cost is in the multi-millions and if there is no
corruption.. everyone feels like you REALLY wasted money. If however there is corruption, then
you feel justified or wonder if you found it all and need more auditing.)