US Election Assistance Commission - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Vote
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Name :   Warren Smith
Organization :   N/A
Post Date :   9/30/2005

General Comments
Comment :  There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about cryptography. That is a red  
herring. What matters is: at any point in time a corruptor could emit the  
right radio message which would cause it to transition into a new "do whatever you want" mode that officially was claimed not to exist. This mode could have been inserted secretly by a programmer. No feasible amount of testing would be able  
to discover the existence of this secret mode and the fact it did not  
always obey the claimed crypto protocols, because the magic "open sesame" message could be 300  
random-looking bits long and depending in a secret way upon the time so  
that any failure of this sort would be essentially irreproducible (since by  
2.2.5.2.1b the voting machine must include a real-time clock). No amount of manual inspection of the  
computer program inside the voting machine (even if it were available for  
inspection) would necessarily find this trapdoor because it is well known  
to be a Turing-undecidable problem to determine whether a computer program  
contains such a trapdoor. See Marvin Minsky: "Finite & Infinite Machines"  
for info about Turing-undecidability. Possible result: the end of democracy in the USA.