Diebold Drops Out of North Carolina
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 by RLRFrom Brad Blog
By Brad Friedman
In North Carolina, Diebold had been attempting to get a special court order allowing them to get around NC’s law requiring that Voting Machine Companies hand over their source code for their secret software to be kept in escrow in the event of a problem later. North Carolina has had many recently, including the complete loss of some 4500+ votes in Cartaret County during the Nov. ‘04 Presidential Election which led to a Re-Vote in the county.
Thanks to efforts by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the court has now ruled against Diebold’s requested dispensation from state law. Now Diebold claims they are going to have to get out of the state entirely. Glad to hear it. If it’s true. Other Voting Machine Companies have complied with the law, apparently, so what’s Diebold’s problem? Do they have something they wish to hide in that source code?
We may never know…
Read more Diebold
“Section. 10. No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility”
And, the “law” in NC doesn’t prevent Deibold from making voting machines, it just prevents those machines from being used by the State for it’s elections if Diebold won’t (can’t) comply. The law doesn’t “force” Diebold to break it’s contract, therefore there’s no problem.
It seems to me that if you want to make a REAL and STABLE Voting machine, you use an OpenSource like Linux that isn’t proprietary and has no “secret code” clauses to use. It’s 100% viewable, and a LOT more secure than Microsoft. Seems to me that if you want stable and secure, you avoid Microsoft at all costs. And if you want “State contracts”, you use systems that let people see you’re not hiding anything.