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"That said, I dislike these computer voting machines. I've been a programmer, and know that I could bury routines in code that could manipulate results. I doubt that anyone would find them or any evidence that they ever existed. "

I disagree. The military has been writing programs to control highly sensitive combat systems, including nuke systems for a very long time. Not only the military, but banking applications, casinos, and pretty much every other application that deals with money all have measures to find hidden routines.
Someone should be able to write a counter program and secure it.
With minimal effort you can secure sensitive applications.

If we really want to crack down on fraud, the place to do it is before you even get to the machine.

I do agree on the operating system being irrelevant, although I can't help chuckling at the thought of Diebold pulling up the NC courthouse with 50 18-wheelers filled with a hard copy of the Windows source code, or the look on faces the 2 "experts" NC hires to go through it all.

"I can't help chuckling at the thought of Diebold pulling up the NC courthouse with 50 18-wheelers filled with a hard copy of the Windows source code, or the look on faces the 2 "experts" NC hires to go through it all."

That is an amusing thought, indeed. I imagine that half of the Windows source code is indecipherable, even to Microsoft, these days.

How many hundreds of people have had their hands into the code that makes up Windows, I wonder? Maybe thousands. Most of them are no longer even at Microsoft.

I stopped programming when Windows 95 came out. I coded solely in Visual Basic, and had six applications in the shareware market. All did pretty darned well, and were very functional.

I was really careful not to code past Microsoft's recommendations, and paid a lot of attention to advisories about using certain calls to DLLs. The result? All of those programs still work perfectly in Windows XP, even though they are sort of hogs of processor cycles due to a lack of multi-threading.

I'm blown away at Microsoft's attention to backwards compatibility. These things, last compiled in 1994, should not run at all in XP. Yet, they do, and without a single hitch.

Amazing!