EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about cryptography. That is a red herring. What matters is: at any point in time a corruptor could emit the right radio message which would cause it to transition into a new "do whatever you want" mode that officially was claimed not to exist. This mode could have been inserted secretly by a programmer. No feasible amount of testing would be able to discover the existence of this secret mode and the fact it did not always obey the claimed crypto protocols, because the magic "open sesame" message could be 300 random-looking bits long and depending in a secret way upon the time so that any failure of this sort would be essentially irreproducible (since by 2.2.5.2.1b the voting machine must include a real-time clock). No amount of manual inspection of the computer program inside the voting machine (even if it were available for inspection) would necessarily find this trapdoor because it is well known to be a Turing-undecidable problem to determine whether a computer program contains such a trapdoor. See Marvin Minsky: "Finite & Infinite Machines" for info about Turing-undecidability. Possible result: the end of democracy in the USA.