it's quite a relief to learn you were involved. maybe you can offer relief for another concern of mine related with the voting system.
back when researchers carried out a successful attack on vote secrecy, finding out a way to unscramble the digital vote records starting from publicly-available information printed by each machine, voting authorities first claimed that the researchers were not attacking the real program, and then they minimized the impact because they needed access to the source code to carry out the unscrambling. that's very worrying. if the audits and security testing did not use the actual software, what purpose would they serve other than manipulation of public perception? whereas if they do use the actual software, then it follows from the second claim that the auditors (parties, public-interest organizations, security researchers), by having access to the source code, gain the ability to unscramble the voting records and thus to compromise vote secrecy. in either case, it seems to imply that the voting authorities themselves, by having access to the actual source code, can indeed compromise vote secrecy. can you offer me verifiable information that could confirm, to me and to an average voter, party member and international observer, that this is not the case, i.e., that the voting authorities are not able to compromise the secrecy of the vote through either public or nonpublic information?