ple in the same manner as in the ballot box election. Although marking of the voting slip and the ballot were carried out on one single device in the voting booth, the act of balloting was said to be transparent for the returning committee and the public since only the voter who had submitted his or her election notification card was able to vote using the voting machine. In legal reality, when it came to the deployment of voting machines the concrete election act of voting was said to be in a conflict of interests between the principle of secret elections and that of the public nature of elections. It was said to be acceptable against this background that in the deployment of computer-controlled voting machines each sub-act of vote registration was not transparent to all. It was said to be one of the particularities of the advance in technology that one could presume that the systems deployed were viable if they had been examined in a special procedure prior to their deployment. This was said to be all the more valid given that the necessary monitoring took place in all other procedural steps, and hence the results that were obtained could be examined to determine their plausibility. The only decisive aspect was said to be whether the public had the fundamental possibility to become convinced of the viability of the election procedure. This was said to be accounted for by voting with voting machines: In particular, the public was able to check the printout of the result of the constituency ascertained by the voting machine and the transfer of the result into the election record, and hence the counting as a whole. By means of the comparison of the ballot records in the register of voters with the valid and invalid first and second votes registered by the device, as prescribed by § 14 of the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance, it was said also to be possible to check whether the voting machine had recorded all the votes and added them correctly. All the stored votes could be printed out as voting slips with the corresponding crosses and subsequently counted by hand. 59 The proceedings for type approval were said not to give rise to an election error. There was also said not to be a right to inspect the source code of the voting machine software with regard to the principle of the public nature of elections since the protection of the operational secrets of the manufacturer of the voting machines was said to outweigh the interest of the public in revealing the source code. 60 According to the convincing descriptions contained in the statement made by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the voting machines which were the subject of the complaint were said to have complied with the provisions of the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance and with the Guidelines for the Construction of Voting Machines. According to the statements of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, manipulations were said to be theoretically possible, but hardly conceivable in practice. There were said to be no indications of deliberate manipulations or accidental alterations to the voting machines used in the Bundestag election forming the subject of the complaint. Even if none of the security measures mentioned were able by themselves to prevent manipulations, all the measures together were said to guarantee a very high degree of security against manipulation of the voting machines. 61 14/37