Earlier this year, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill that sets up standards for voting equipment used in elections. The bill sets out to “restore public confidence in the election process”. The law outlines many vendor responsibilities in Section 2.(a), including that “the vendor shall place in escrow with an independent escrow agent approved by the State Board of Elections all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system, including, but not limited to, a complete copy of the source and executable code…” as well as including “a list of programmers responsible for creating the software”. The penalties for violating the bill include a felony charge and a civil penalty of up to $100,000 per violation.

The new state law has led to Diebold threatening to pull out of the state, due to not being able to meet these openness requirements. Diebold originally sought an exemption, via an injunction guarding against prosecution as well as reinterpreting the law to not include Diebold’s situation. According to this AP article, Diebold claims that it cannot provide the source code nor list of programmers for Windows, on which their voting machines are based. The EFF was involved in the case to thwart Diebold’s exemption status; the EFF details its involvement and links to its legal brief here.

I find Diebold’s position confusing and questionable in this situation. To say that they cannot comply with the state law means that they are either unwilling to comply, find it overly difficult to do so, or actually find it impossible to meet the requirements. If the first or second case is true, then Diebold is simply making a business decision not to compete in North Carolina. If, however, compliance is actually impossible, then one wonders how Diebold is still able to do business in California, where the Elections Code requires “an exact copy of the source code” for voting machines be provided to the state. Is the North Carolina market simply not worth it to Diebold?

North Carolina is supposed to announce today the list of approved vendors for electronic voting machines that meet the new law’s requirements.

This entry was posted by Paul Otto (pnotto@ncsu.edu) on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.