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After EFF Litigation, Diebold Pulls Out of North Carolina
Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Friday, December 23, 2005 Contact: Cindy Cohn Legal Director Electronic Frontier Foundation cindy@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x108 (office), +1 415 307-2148 (cell) Matt Zimmerman Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation mattz@eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x127 After EFF Litigation, Diebold Pulls Out of North Carolina Raleigh, North Carolina - After a series of lawsuits led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to defend North Carolina's election integrity laws, controversial electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems finally withdrew from the state's voting machine procurement process on Thursday. In November, Diebold filed suit against the North Carolina Board of Elections to try to avoid a state requirement that vendors place into escrow all source code "that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system." Under a strong new state law, this code is to be available to the Board of Elections and the chairs of the state political parties for review so that they could look for security vulnerabilities. EFF intervened in the case on behalf of local voter integrity advocate Joyce McCloy and succeeded in convincing the judge to dismiss the case and require Diebold to comply. Despite Diebold's open admission that it could not meet the state requirements for voting machine integrity, the Board of Elections later agreed to certify Diebold. EFF filed suit against the Board of Elections last week, arguing that the Board had violated its own obligations to perform extensive security-related tests of all of the code on all certified systems prior to certification. The court denied EFF's motion, but Diebold was nonetheless forced to withdraw from the North Carolina procurement process because it did not escrow its code. In a letter to the Board of Elections on Thursday, Diebold indicated that it is still unwilling to comply with the law. Instead, it offered to help the state "revise" the law so that "all vendors will be able to comply with the state election law." "The purpose of election integrity law is to ensure that votes are accurately counted, not to ensure that all equipment vendors can comply," said Matt Zimmerman, EFF's Staff Attorney specializing in electronic voting issues. "The law requires voting machine transparency for good reason. All vendors must realize that the public will not and should not accept a process that forces them to simply trust, but not verify, their votes are accurately counted." By withdrawing from North Carolina's electronic voting contract, Diebold cedes the market to competitor ES&S. The rival company has stated that it will comply with all state escrow requirements. For this release: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004286 About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/ -end- _______________________________________________ presslist mailing list https://falcon.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/presslist (Log in to post comments)
After EFF Litigation, Diebold Pulls Out of North Carolina Posted Jan 5, 2006 7:05 UTC (Thu) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link] EFF does deserve our support. Here is more proof.
After EFF Litigation, Diebold Pulls Out of North Carolina Posted Jan 6, 2006 8:04 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] Anybody know what a state's voting machine contract is worth? How much money did Diebold walk away from just because it couldn't put its precious source code in *escrow* to be reviewed by a very limited number of people? (I'm assuming that part of the process requires the limited number of people to not disclose any of the actual code to anyone of the group except contracted technical experts bound by an NDA, and maybe in the worst case, the local district attorney.)
What the heck is Diebold afraid of? If I lived somewhere where I had to vote with a Diebold machine, I'd be very worried now. The things that come to my mind are:
1. Diebold knows or suspects that election fraud is buried in the software (either at the executive level of Diebold, or just done by some line coder who wants to earn some extra cash and has never had their code reviewed).
2. Coding errors so bad that the vote counter is essentially a random number generator.
3. a) Diebold is too lazy to write their own software that counts the number of times certain buttons are pressed, so they stole someone else's, and they're afraid of a much-deserved infringement lawsuit.
3. b) Someone has patented voting.
4. The whole thing is a trivially modified MSDN example application written in VBA running on top of Office, and as such Diebold actually owns none of it, so they couldn't comply with the rules even if they wanted to.
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