Diebold in North Carolina III

This is the third installment of taking a look at Diebold in North Carolina. Last posted on here.

To recap, Diebold makes electronic voting [e-voting] machines. They refuse to make them spit out a paper trail making them non-recountable. The North Carolina Board of Elections enacted a new law mandating that all of the source code, including third party code by vendors like Micro$oft, be placed in escrow to be turned over for review if there was a close election result. Diebold refused to agree to the terms. NC BoE said bye bye Diebold. Then, they said, wait, come back.

Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against two state agencies of N.C. for certifying the illegal machines. From Wired News:

The case comes as e-voting-machine makers put on their best faces in advance of looming deadlines for states seeking to qualify for federal funds to replace aging voting systems.

Amid the jockeying, Diebold Systems chairman and chief executive Walden O'Dell resigned from his post Monday. The move caps a controversy that engulfed the company after O'Dell wrote a fund-raising letter at the height of the 2004 presidential contest promising to deliver Ohio to President George W. Bush.

In the suit filed last week, EFF says the North Carolina State Board of Elections -- working with the Office of Information Technology Services -- certified two vendors to sell machines in North Carolina although the vendors did not comply with a new law requiring them to place all source code for a system into escrow before the machines could be certified.

The people at Diebold say that the third party code is just commercial off the shelf [COTS] code and that they don't have the authority to release it. But...

This has long been a stickler for voting activists and computer scientists who say Diebold does modify Windows CE. Furthermore, COTS software is just as vulnerable to tampering as any other software and probably more so if hackers or election fraudsters know it will never be examined. This is why, they say, the North Carolina law is so important.

I know that I can go in an hack my Windows XP SP2 box if I wanted to. It's not hard. I know that they are more than capable of doing the same thing. Modified code is no longer 'not theirs' - they probably broke licensing agreements with Micro$oft if they did modify it as well.

This suit went to court in N.C. earlier today.