EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | But under the current guidelines there is little or no motivation for manufacturers to try to do so, as far as I know the manufacturers have never adopted bug-free software techniques, and the whole cost and responsibility of debugging the software is shifted to the US taxpayer and to some undefined and unprovided testing and certifying agency. With the rule changes I recommend here, the voting machine manufacturer would actually be required or at least highly incentivized to do what it takes to provide bug-free code. You may ask: why are my rules demanding that the computer be a primitive, low-capacity sort of computer? The answer is that voting only requires a low-capacity computer. So this is no handicap! It is, however, a handicap when it comes to installing enormous bug-filled untested unclear programs. Which is good because we want to prevent that and force all programs, and I mean "all," to be small and clear. (Realize: you can make the evil code actually eat itself so that it cannot be detected afterwards. You can make evil code invisible in the source code by means of language-redefintion techniques. This is known to have been done. But these cheating techniques are not easy to do if the code is tiny.)