Are commodity PCs adequately reliable or powerful to use as voting machines?
Yes. Modern commodity personal computers, even ones that are a few years old, are enormously powerful once unburdened from all of the ancillary tasks that we typically load onto a personal computer. The primary difference between a typical personal computer and one used as a voting machine is that the computers used for voting must be physically protected from tampering. This is easily done by putting them into a locked container (with adequate ventilation.) Many DREs do exactly this. In addition, in the Open Voting system, there will be several types of voting machines. There will be multiple types of voting stations in order to accommodate the needs of physically impaired voters. And there will be ballot readers so that voters can verify the accuracy of their ballots. Each of these different machines will have some peripheral hardware not found on the typical personal computer. For example, voting stations may have touch screens. And ballot readers may have bar code readers. Many mac
