DRE vendors say their software has been thoroughly tested. Isn that good enough?
It is not enough to show that a system “seems to work.” We know that the testing of existing DRE systems has already missed some impressive flaws. For example, Diebold voting systems in Georgia would “lock up” after a few hours use, despite being tested in a mock election with more votes than a typical machine got during the real election. Second, testing for security problems, especially if they were intentionally introduced and concealed, is basically impossible. Consider the cute surprises inserted by programmers into commercial software that are triggered by obscure combinations of commands and keystrokes, called “Easter eggs.” These routinely slip through vendor’s quality assurance testing, including the amazing flight simulator that is hidden in Microsoft Excel ’97. An Easter egg slipped into a voting program would never be detected. If the Easter egg allowed a voter to modify the votes inside the machine, it could change the whole election. 2.2. DRE vendors claim that preserving
