> > The machines are supposed to check themselves. A machine that reads the > > ballot twice would be much more accurate even if it had minor errors. > > Supposedly, but we don't really know. They're designed and marketed > as off-the-shelf commercial products, and the public and the state officials > don't get to go through the designs with a fine-tooth comb to prove 100% > fault coverage. Trade secrets is the justification.
I have come to the conclusion that trade secrets are harmful and should be outlawed. Patents and copyrights are carrots used to entice creators to share, but they do not work well enough. Both happen to have major problems at the moment. At the very least, things like medical devices and voting machines should have complete, open, documentation. I would also include industrial and consumer devices. There would probably need to be a few exceptions, military devices come to mind. > > >Count all votes twice, once with Brand-A machine, once with Brand-B > > >machine, which is required to be significantly different from Brand-A. > > >If the counts differ, run them through again. Still different? > > >Hand recount. > > Right now, there's only one brand that can be programmed to read the > new NH columnar ballot, and it's already been shown to be hackable. Not to > mention, built by a company involved in multiple scandals. But this is > along the same lines as one of my suggestions, to allow anyone who has the > right to station poll inspectors and request a recount to make an unofficial > machine count with their own unapproved equipment. There is a problem with that. If I want to prevent a future recount, I could perform an unofficial recount using an unapproved equipment which turns out to shred every 10th ballot, and/or add marks. > That's why I don't have a lot of confidence in black-box testing > with a limited number of cases. For safety-critical avionics controls, > RTCA/DO-178 requires analyzing every path through the logic, and proving > fault coverage of every path and every decision alternative. That isn't > even possible with an off-the-shelf microprocessor, because only the > manufacturer has accesss to its exact logic design. I suspect that any device that requires several 9s of reliability gets tested for every logic path and every code path. Has anyone thought about the reliability goal for OGP products? How many 9s do we want? It isn't immediately obvious that a failure will result in loss of life, so trying for 6-8 9s doesn't seem justified. On the other hand, we don't want the sort of useless crap cranked out by places like microsoft and intel (what are they? 1 9?). Would 4 9s be a reasonable goal? > > >Hand recounts of a few randomly selected precincts. > > Won't pick up low-probabability logic errors or random malfunctions, > not to mention the dreaded intermittents. The idea is to try and catch cheating. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
