I am a big fan of RLAs. Basically we ran the election in 2020 in a way very few statistical tests could be run to compute a confidence level on the ballots.

However, software builds can be hashed and signed, and open source hardware can refuse to load unsigned builds. But how to evaluate the signature? This is where small cryptographic proofs from blockchains provide a distributed ledger.

The hardware and the software can be reviewed by everyone earning money in the voting game, and when disputes arise, there is no excuse to demand access to the voting machines because everyone has access by definition.

Open Source solves both pragmatic transparency issues, and political ones.