North Carolina Illegally Certifies Diebold Bugware

In the latest news in this saga, the North Carolina Board of Elections ignored the rules to escrow code and identify programmers as it certified Diebold Election Systems to sell electronic voting equipment despite Diebold’s repeated admission that it could not comply with the election law.

"The Board of Elections has simply flouted the law," said Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "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. The Board’s job is to protect voters, not corporations who want to obtain multi-million dollar contracts with the state."

Ruining the Diebold argument, at least one competitor, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software has publicly stated that it is capable of meeting the escrow requirement.

It appears as if the parties involved are setting up for a prolonged fight between the company, the board of elections, the legislature, and the judiciary.

CNet discusses North Carolina's response despite glitches in one of the state's counties 2004 Presidential election result that lead to the loss of more than 4,500 votes.

Not surprisingly, the feds have also been making noise about the availability of e-voting machine source code.