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.
Vendors insist that their programs are proprietary and state certification boards appear to agree.
In addition, there are no mandatory guidelines the vendors have to follow, other than their own, when it comes to installing specific security features on voting systems. There is also no organized effort on the part of election officials to demand that certain criteria for reliability and accuracy are met. With little pressure for change coming from the election community, or anyone else for that matter, the vendors are free to do as they see fit. The public needs to be thinking about these questions. Someone needs to be providing the answers.