Commissioners, Election Assistance Commission and
Brian Hancock, ITA Secretariat
United States Election Assistance Commission
1225 New York Avenue N.W. Suite - 1100
Washington, DC 20005

RE: ITA must re-inspect all source code!

Dear Commissioners and Secretariat,

As a citizen and voter, I strongly urge that the Federal Independent Testing Authority (ITA) who inspected, for federal qualification, the software used on Diebold Optical Scan and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines be ordered to re-inspect all source code, including any code used on memory cards, looking in particular for 'interpreted' code.

'Interpreted' code is expressly banned for use on any voting systems as per the 2002 Federal Election Commission Voting System Standards Volume 1, Section 4.2.2, yet Diebold Elections Systems Inc. has admitted, in California, that they use 'interpreted' code in their AccuBasic software and it may be used elsewhere in their code.

This revelation from Diebold representatives and from documents obtained by "Freedom Of Information Act" from various sources points to a failure on the part of the ITA to use due diligence in their inspection of Diebold source code and software.

It is because of this failure on the part of the ITA and Diebold's revelations that all Diebold software/source code must be reinspected by the ITA. The ITA should then report back whether the software/source code includes any 'interpreted' code and if that is the case, as Diebold has admitted, the EAC must direct that all Diebold software be decertified until such time as they can show that they have removed all such prohibited software.

This action must not stop with the Diebold products alone, as there is ample evidence that other voting systems also contain 'interpreted' code.

The Voting System Standards were written by experts in the field of computer sciences and elections, and it is absolutely crucial to the integrity of our democracy that they be strictly followed. The job of the ITA is to ensure that the voting machine vendors follow those standards or be denied federal qualification. I demand that every single vendor be held to these standards.

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