Re: Certifiable code

> I assume you have copies of the 1990 and 2002 FEC standards for
> voting systems, right? If not I will send them to you. Most
> states currenty accept the FEC standards with little or no
> additional requirements.
>
All due respect, David. Karl also said,

> And I don't think that the certification target should be merely
> to pass the lowest of the low. Rather I believe that it should
> be done in a way that reflects the kind of practices we would
> like to see in other social-infrastructure software.
>
I believe you are correct that the FEC standards say little about Karl's
issues.
http://www.fec.gov/pages/vss/v1/v1s4.htm
I note 4.2.1 says,

     Software associated with the logical and numerical
     operations on vote data shall use a high level
     programming language, such as: Pascal, Visual Basic,
     Java, C and C++. The requirement for the use of high
     level language for logical operations does not
     preclude the use of assembly language for hardware-related
     segments, such as device controllers and handler programs.
     Also, operating system software may be designed in
     assembly language.

A year or so ago, I commented on this:
http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/initial-digests/0075.html

My conclusion was a bit harsh then, saying the standards were "crap."
However, I feel we can do a lot better (as Karl suggests). One value of our
open source voting software development effort would be to raise the
standards, whether officially adopted or not.

Alan Dechert
==================================================================
= The content of this message, with the exception of any external
= quotations under fair use, are released to the Public Domain
==================================================================
Received on Tue Aug 31 23:17:22 2004