BadGimp

Diebold Accused Of Skirting Election Law Again...

Legal Issues Contributed by Mike on Friday, November 18th, 2005 @ 04:48PM
posted from TechDirt:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20051118/1648200_F.shtml

from the what-are-they-hiding? dept.

Diebold never seems to think the law applies to it. The maker of electronic voting machines, has a long history of questionable activity when it comes to those machines. After it was discovered that internal documents proved that the company knew about security flaws in their own software, they sued, claiming copyright infringement -- basically confessing that the documents were legit. There were additional stories about Diebold illegally changing their software at the last minute, leaving default passwords, threatening extortionate prices to add a paper trail, and mostly hiding the fact that the main person who wrote most of the voting machine software had been jailed for fraud in the past. With all that in mind, you would think that (1) the company's e-voting machines would deserve extra scrutiny and (2) the company would bend over backwards to assist in that scrutiny to prove their systems were fine. It appears that's not the case. Over in North Carolina, where a new law says e-voting companies need to hand over their source code, Diebold somehow convinced a judge to exempt it from obeying that law. The EFF is now suing Diebold for evading the law in North Carolina. They may have a tough case, but it still should be scary for anyone still using electronic voting machines that this is still happening. It's entirely possible that Diebold has a legitimate reason for getting the exemption -- but it would seem like they should be pretty forthcoming in explaining just what that is.

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Link over and read the article - they have a number of imbedded links that are worth a look..

posted by BadGimp @ 9:36 PM