Oh my god, this is the source code review for a certified voting machine

As outrageous as this is, it's missing the forest for the trees.

For voting machines to be "secure", not only would there have to be a serious software audit, but also a serious hardware audit (as hardware could otherwise override software). Then you'd have to somehow make sure that it was the said software and no other that was actually running on the hardware. Then you'd have to make sure that the machines were tamper-proof. All of this would have to be done by multiple auditors from each political party.

You'd have to do this for each of the thousand or tens of thousands of voting machines out there. Then you'd have to do the same for the vote counting machines, which are as if not more important than the individual voting machines.

All of this complexity is ridiculous, and taken together I'm sure there'll still be plenty of zero-day vulnerabilities after even serious audits of all of the above.

Just use pen and paper instead.

The workings of voting computers are opaque to a large part of the voting population. The sad thing here is that this certification process actually sounds quite good if you do not understand the technical details. In my opinion, voting machines are more trouble than they are worth, simply because of the loss of understanding of the workings of the voting process.

That said, it is always interesting to read analyses like this.

I don't know why people insist on capitalizing words that shouldn't be capitalized, like JAVA.

If this skeeves you out, wait until you see the verification process that (US) aerospace and industrial programs have to go through. talk to one in a bar and they'll bluff and bluster about the "verification" and "intense testing" their systems go through but as far as the software goes, at the end of the day, it comes down to basically this.

This brings me memories https://xkcd.com/463/

They turned what should be a build step into a multi-million business. Kudos to them.