Voting machine company sued
Group says judge's ruling defeats law
Lynn Bonner    News-Observer    19 November 2005

Voting machine companies should have to abide by a new law requiring they turn over information on how their systems work, a Winston-Salem woman says in a court filing.

Joyce McCloy, founder of the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting, wants a Wake County Superior Court judge to limit or remove an order that relieves companies from having to meet all the law's disclosure requirements.

Acceding to a request from Diebold Election Systems, Judge Howard E. Manning Jr. decided this month that companies competing to supply the state with voting machines won't be held liable if they don't provide all information about the machines' software and its creators, as spelled out in the law.

Diebold machines use software the company did not create, said Doug Hanna, a Raleigh lawyer representing the company. "The statute says all software and all programmers," he said. "There was a concern by the client that we wouldn't be able to comply 100 percent with the statute."
The company is still working to see if it is able to meet all disclosure requirements, he said.

According to the company Web site, Diebold has an election system that uses Microsoft Windows.

McCloy said the law was written to protect voters from machine malfunctions and botched elections.

"The law is to protect us," she said, "not this big corporation."

A lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Matt Zimmerman, is flying in from California to represent McCloy at a Nov. 28 court hearing.

The state passed a ground-breaking law that should be supported rather than skirted, Zimmerman said.

The Diebold case is a front in the battle to "introduce and enforce election integrity," he sai