70% of the votes in the November elections

... were counted using software "independently" tested (only) by Ciber, Inc. What's wrong with that? Well, the Election Assistance Commission — set up to oversee the new touch-screen and optical-reader voting machines used in most states in the November 2006 elections — has slammed the company's testing processes and diligence.

CIBER has not shown the resorces to provide a reliable product. The current quality managment plan requires more time to spend on managing the process than they appear to have available and it was clear during the assessment visit that they had not accepted that they have a responsibility to provide quality reviewed reports that show what was done in testing. The ITA Practice Director indicated during the assessment that their difficulties were that corporate CIBER did not allow for the personnel resource time for quality management functions but there may be other alternatives for allocating the resources.

In addition, during the review, ITA Practice Director indicated that the testing for a product tends to either use vendor developed tests or new tests developed specifically for the product — they have no standard test methods defined. This makes their testing dependent on the vendor input and vulnerable to unique vendor interpretations rather than a core validated set of internal references for training and testing.

"Trust us. Would we sell you a shoddy product?"