One of the projects undertaken by the Clearinghouse was the development of standards for vote tabulating systems. The task took five years to complete and resulted in voluntary standards for minimal levels of hardware and software performance. The vendors were given a great deal of discretion in such critical areas as the choice of programming language, determining the system specifications and security features, and defining the accuracy of the systems. An independent audit of the software is not required. Audit trails are not required.
Vendors can continue to help election officials run elections.
In short, the voluntary standards allow everything and give the vendors too much power. The vendors who design and sell electronic voting systems comprise a small but important industry that is unregulated and has no mandatory standards to follow from either federal or state agencies during product development. None of these businesses have to contend with regulators or oversight committees unless the local or state authorities require it. When voting systems do have to be certified by a state, the certification procedures are not very stringent in critical areas. For example, no state requires that election software be audited.