VVSG 1.1 COMMENTS

Dear
Sir/Madam

 

We
have read with interest the latest draft of the Voluntary Voting Systems
Guidelines and would offer the following comments for your consideration. 

 

 

1.     
 General
Remarks

 

We believe it is a retrograde step to remove all references to the
need to use open standards for data exchanges.  Just saying “use
XML” will achieve nothing other than chaos and rework.  You can
exchange any data using XML but unless that data is in a consistent format and
handled in a consistent way you will not achieve full interoperability which
has to be the goal.  We would urge you to re-instate the references to
open data standards and also the guidance, or preferably stronger terminology,
to use the OASIS EML standard.

 

Following on from the above point we would question how you can
test something without knowing what the results should be?  So if you have
no idea what the data being used is, which from the current draft you obviously
don’t,  then how can you set criteria for the expected results. 
 

 

You are also missing the following categories from your test
suites - voting recording, tallying and results reporting testing.   We
would point you to EML v6.0, shortly to be approved as an OASIS standard and
then submitted to ISO for approval, that contains templates for allowing US
results and examples to be fully developed - so that testing can be performed
and outputs compared to the expected XML.

 

 

2.     
 Specific
Remarks

On pages
183 and 186 add "such as OASIS EML XML" at the end of the sentences
mentioning XML.

On page B8,
the version of EML mentioned is wrong it should be v5.0,  but this
reference should not be included anyway as EML is no longer included in this
draft – but see our comment above

 

 

Regards

John
Borras

 

Chair
OASIS E&VS Technical Committee

 

m.
+(0)44 7976 157745

Skype: 
gov3john