EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | In particular it is simply outrageous to allow voting machines to run enormous programs whose code is secret and undoubtably partially written by paid foreign secret agents, and containing huge bug counts, such as "Microsoft Windows". But the present guidelines, outrageously, permit that. (Why not simply tell the USSR to run our elections for us? Wouldn't that be simpler?) A computer program 100 million lines long containing just a few lines of rogue code could do extremely dangerous things inside a voting machine, and no checking procedure whatever by anyone is capable of guaranteeing spotting that rogue code, because that checking problem is well known to be Turing-undecidable. Voting machines in use in the USA are already known to contain trapdoor code and continue to be used anyway. Thus computers are an extremely dangerous thing to have inside a voting machine. For that reason, if they are there, we want to maximize the chances the program is valid. If the program is small and on view by everybody in the world for 1 year, that maximizes chances of spotting such trapdoors. If the program is kept secret, made technically easy to change, and is allowed to be huge and to consist of "obscured" code - all of which is outrageously permitted by the proposed guidelines - then that minimizes the chances. Again my strategy with this rule is to make a rule that is checkable and that is not Turing-undecidable, and that removes the nuclear weapon rather than handing them out on streetcorners but with the caveat that the recipients must sign pieces of paper saying they will not misuse them. (Here "large alterable computer programs" are playing the role of the "nuclear weapon".)