EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | * As soon as anybody spots a bug and reports it to that government agency, all bug-fixes to the software must be paid for by the voting machine manufacturer and note that every such bug fix and paying is to include the 1-year public pre-viewing requirement for the new modified program and hence the payment must include the cost of the 1-year required downtime for the buggy machine. * Anybody who does spot and report such a bug must be paid a reward by the voting machine manufacturer, where the first reward is the price of that voting machine, and each successive reward is double the value of the previous one until the the price reaches the USA per capita income or 16 times the price of that machine, whichever is higher. This is to continue until such time as the manufacturer declares these machines to be incapable of meeting requirements and hence must all be withdrawn from use - and if that happens the manufacturer must refund half of all purchase prices of those machines. These here rules are intended to make it impossible or at least difficult to "reprogram" the computer without wholesale replacement of the ROM. That in turn allows us to at least hope to obtain reasonable confidence the machine is actually running the program it was advertised to be running. Also the difficulty and expense of replacing the ROM should tend to incentivize manufacturers to provide only simple programs without bugs. It is technically possible to make computer programs bug-free - although only comparatively small, simple, and clear ones.