I was interested in what you said about voting machines. I once did a letter to the editor about voting machines. If you go into a Las Vegas casino, for every slot machine, the software has to be on file with the State of Nevada, the Gaming Commission. For Diebold voting machines, we are told that the software is proprietary, a trade secret, so the public has no right to know.
On the voting machines they were using where I live, at that time, you press a button on the machine and you can see the ballot drop into a box, but you can't actually see where the mark is on the ballot. They have changed the system since then, though.