Dec. 5, 2005 – In what some groups are charging is an illegal move, the North Carolina Board of Elections certified voting machines made by three companies which had previously admitted they could not conform to new state requirements that computer code be accessible to elections officials.
The board?s move came just days after a state judge voided a temporary exemption from certain portions of the elections regulations granted to Diebold and told the company that it must comply with all provision of the law.
Friday, the public-interest advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation charged that the elections board "simply flouted the law" in approving applications by Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems & Software to sell equipment throughout the state, despite admissions by all three that they are unable to place their software codes in escrow as required under the October rules.
"In August, the state passed tough new rules designed to ensure transparency in the election process, and the Board simply decided to take it upon itself to overrule the legislature," EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman said in a press statement. "The Board's job is to protect voters, not corporations who want to obtain multi-million-dollar contracts with the state."
North Carolina?s certification of voting machines came about despite widespread and well-documented problems with the systems in the state and elsewhere.
During the 2004 elections, e-voting machines in a single North Carolina county lost over 2,500 votes, CNet News reported. A number of organizations and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found voting irregularities in Georgia, Ohio, Virginia and elsewhere in elections this year. Most of the machines involved were manufactured by the three companies North Carolina certified on December 1.
The companies maintain that contracts with third parties for the computer source code prevent them from placing them in escrow, where public officials can access the code in case of new lost votes or other voting problems. "We don't know how we'd provide source code for Windows CE or whatever third-party vendor it may be," Diebold spokesman David Bear told CNet. "It's like buying a computer at Best Buy: You don't own Microsoft Word; you license the use of it."
