wa-law.org > bill > 2025-26 > HB 1978 > Original Bill
The legislature finds that transparency to the public is of utmost importance in maintaining confidence that the votes cast in our elections are counted accurately. In the most recent elections, there have been much criticism of the lack of accurate vote counts. A lack of faith in election results causes many enfranchised citizens to not participate in elections.
Businesses that manufacture hardware or software devices do not currently share their source codes with the public. The legislature finds that requiring election tabulation equipment vendors to make source codes available to members of the general public, upon request, will increase transparency in election results and increase voter confidence with election outcomes.
Any contract with a vendor of ballot tabulation machines, ballot tabulation hardware, or ballot tabulation software must include a provision requiring the vendor to provide the county auditor with the source code for the program used in the ballot tabulation machine, ballot tabulation hardware, or ballot tabulation software. To the extent that the source code is not deemed confidential, and its disclosure is not prohibited, under this title or chapter 42.56 RCW, the county auditor shall make the source code available for public inspection and copying.
For the purpose of this section, "source code" means a computer program in its original programming language written in the form of functions, descriptions, definitions, calls, methods, and other operational statements that describes sequences of specific actions that a computer interprets and executes to perform a specific task.