Diebold ordered to supply source code

A federal judge has ordered Diebold to hand over the source code on its electronic voting machines to North Carolina state officials. From the EFF:

"a North Carolina judge today told Diebold Election Systems that the e-voting company must comply with tough North Carolina election law and dismissed the company's case seeking broad exemptions from the law.

EFF intervened in the case earlier this month, after Diebold obtained a broad temporary restraining order that allowed it to evade key transparency requirements without criminal or civil liability. The law requires escrow of the source code for all voting systems to be certified in the state and identification of programmers. In today's hearing, the judge told Diebold if it wanted to continue in the bidding process for certified election systems in the state, it must follow the law and if it failed to do so, it would face liability...

Diebold could appeal the ruling, go forward with its bid, or withdraw from the process. However, Diebold told the court that it would likely withdraw the bid if the company did not have liability protection.

North Carolina experienced one of the most serious malfunctions of e-voting systems in the 2004 presidential election when over 4,500 ballots were lost in a voting system provided by Diebold competitor UniLect Corp. The new transparency and integrity provisions of the North Carolina election law were passed in response to this and other documented malfunctions that have occurred across the country."

It is very good news that a judge should enforce transparency requirements on a voting machine vendor. Given that Diebold have explicitly now threatened to withdraw from the bidding process rather than hand over theie source code, it will be interesting to watch to see if they follow through on that. Transparency is fundamental to the democratic process and no amount of technology or commerce should be allowed to undermine that.