It is important to remember that e-voting system manufacturers are not the opposing team in the e-voting development game. We should all be playing for the same team! Manufacturers, in general, appreciate any assistance that is available where it is likely to improve the quality of their product, or make it easier to identify and maintain a customer base. They understand that the e-voting systems that they are attempting to sell are open to criticism and that this criticism could impact on sales and revenue. They also understand that the design of their systems is a result of a number of decisions with respect to complicated trade-offs involving cost, quality, time-to-market, marketability, maintainability, reputation, risk of failure, and so on.
Design decisions need to be driven by the needs of the customer and targeted towards leveraging the technology available to the manufacturer. Clearly, the CoE standards should assist e-voting machine manufacturers in making design decisions that help to bridge the gap between what is required and how the requirement is to be met. A well-structured standard should help manufacturers in structuring their own design models in such a way that they can have more confidence that the design decisions they are making (or have already made) are good ones, both for them and for their customers.
Furthermore, manufacturers should be able to provide feedback into the standards documentation (process) by highlighting where the standards did not help them in the decision making process, and where this resulted in poor design decisions being made.