[lblume]

Could you not compile them on the voting machines itself? But yes, there is always going to be some level of trust involved, and the bar for manipulation seems to be lower than re: manual counting.

[callc]

Turtles all the way down. Can you trust your compiler?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

[fsflover]

This problem can be solved by the bootstrappable builds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41368835

[delfinom]

But do you trust the processor? Which can also be backdoored internally to start rewriting instructions on the fly?

[fsflover]

You use different CPUs and compare the result. Also, you can try this: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

This is called "security through compartmentalization", i.e., you don't trust one single entity. The only approach that works.