Reply #3: Good info - thanks [View All]

[Ivory_Tower]

I could have never explained the life of a contractor that well.

I was recently involved in a software evaluation task similar to what SAIC had to do for Maryland (my project was on a vastly smaller scale), so I was interested to read the SAIC report. I haven't finished it yet, but from what I can tell it's very professionally done and not a whitewash. Interestingly, they seem to have reached some of the same conclusions that we did on our project -- the software is flawed, and risks can be minimized by tightening up the operating procedures.

The concern I have about that approach is that with the project I reviewed there is only one point of entry, i.e., one operations center that we need to tighten procedurally. The voting machine issue requires defining tight procedures over hundreds (thousands?) of sites. While it might not be logistically impossible, it will be a headache.

The other issue I have is that I haven't seen anything about verifying that SAIC's recommendations have been (will be) implemented properly -- it won't do anyone any good if the recommendations aren't correctly followed. I would hope there will be a follow-up review after a certain period of time, but I haven't seen anything that states this.

And finally, out of curiosity, I'd like to know how large the SAIC review team was, and how much time they spent on the review.

But so far it doesn't look like some big conspiracy to me. Still some risk there, but nothing outright nefarious.

(btw, the reason my project did not recommend a re-write of the software was due to schedule constraints -- holding off the entire project to write the software again would have been prohibitively expensive. Sometimes those are the tradeoffs that have to be made.)