Following their loss in court, evote machine vendor, Diebold, threatened to withdraw from the bidding process for electronic voting machines in North Carolina. Then the North Carolina Board of Elections agreed to certify Diebold as an approved supplier anyway, despite the companies insistence that it would not hand over the details of how their machines worked. Now Diebold have withdrawn from the bidding process.
"At various stages of this fight, both Diebold and the Board of Elections forcefully and repeatedly argued that voters have no direct interest in election integrity. Instead, the voting equipment certification process – one that merely selects the equipment on which voters will be forced to cast their vote – should be left to the “real” interested parties.
Such myopic sensibilities are not only absurd but dangerous. Too many (though certainly not all) election officials across the country treat the certification process as if the vendors were their clients, deserving of favors and rule bending. Voters – the only constituency that matters in this process – are too often treated like ill-mannered party-crashers when they try to ensure that their interests are being protected."
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