ITAs show up and speak...

Two of the three voting system ITAs showed up for a recent hearing by Senator Bowen. BBV has a transcript posted and here are some choice quotes:

"[W]hat we do is look at every line of code and at least make sure it meets every requirement within the VSS. And that is a limitation to some extent of what we're doing versus what I used to do in my IV&V days with the Department of Defense. We were chartered with finding all bugs, all defects period. Zero bugs, zero defects for every staged spacecraft software. We're not chartered with that here, we're chartered to show that the electronic voting system is a viable, qualified system that meets the requirements within the VSS. Is it completely bug free? My test engineers would love to have that charter, but we don't. We don't have that. We have to show that an electronic voting system can be used in a way that is outlined by the standards."
-- Brian Phillips, SysTest Labs.

Follow up:

Systest (Brian Phillips): I'm not sure how many polling place devices that L.A. County may have in any particular precinct, what's the maximum number they might have?
Senator Debra Bowen: In a primary?
Systest (Brian Phillips): Or in any election, if they would have two or three or four.
Senator Debra Bowen: Oh no, way more than that.
Systest (Brian Phillips): For a precinct?
Senator Debra Bowen: Yes.
Systest (Brian Phillips): I'm used to Colorado where I see two or three.
Senator Debra Bowen: No I think it's more, you can have easily 10 voting stations in a primary in a precinct where you've got the maximum number of voters. That's just my experience walking into my Los Angeles County polling place.

So, 10 voting machines at $3,000 apiece in 5,000 polling places? That's a bit much (maybe not for the Inka-Vote terminals which are like optical scan versions of punchcards).

"Our ITA process ñ by the way, we refer to it as ITA process, it's qualification testing. The vendor receives the checklist from Systest Labs. Now this is the checklist that was referred to by Wyle, 33 pages, that was developed by the three ITAs together to identify all of the requirements in the VSS that a vendor must meet." (Brian Phillips, Systest)

I would love to take a look at this checklist.

Senator Debra Bowen: That's certainly true with the server error in North Carolina. That certainly was a factor in Chicago where I understand that 4,000 poll workers had never seen the machine that they were setting up. Wyle (Joe Hazeltine): And the one in North Carolina where the screen said that the memory was full and it was ignored. I mean the machine was identifying that it was a condition outside its bounds but it wasn't being properly monitored.

I'm sorry, but that's BS. The error message was cryptic and you could manually override the error condition and cast a vote into a black hole. The vendor was Unilect.