Well, forget about Diebold pulling it's voting machines out of North Carolina because
North Carolina has gone ahead and certified the systems anyway.
Just this past Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a case mandating that Diebold divulge its code into escrow. Diebold refused and threatened to pull its machines from the state entirely.
Today, the North Carolina Board of Elections unconditionally certified Diebold, Election Systems & Software, and Sequoia Voting Systems.
In regards to Diebold, either the NC BoE went ahead and approved Diebold's systems without review of its code or they hired computer and security experts to review and approve Diebold's systems in three days.
More inside on why it's the former rather than the later.
Brad Blog reports:
And who made the decision to go ahead and ignore the code and certify Diebold? A gentleman by the name of Keith Long was hired to be in charge of the process for the state. And what are Mr. Long's credentials to handle this job? Mr. Long was one of the Diebold representatives responsible for previously selling the Diebold voting system to the state of Georgia.
The
Greensboro News-Record says of Long:
Keith Long's job is to find vendors to sell voting equipment to local election boards and determine whether that equipment meets federal and state guidelines.
As recently as Oct. 1, 2004, Long worked for Diebold Election Systems, and between 1983 and 1992 he worked for Sequoia Pacific Voting Systems. Both Diebold and Sequoia are bidding to work in North Carolina.
BlackBoxVoting says of Long:
Mr. Long is an ex-Diebold employee (2002-2005) who proudly stated in his resume that he "Directed a 60 million dollar project to successfully install 22,000 electronic voting machines in the State of Georgia on time and under budget."
Long is not listed on the NC BoE website.
Just this week, Long said:
"none of them have the source code for all of their software they use."
Oh well then, I guess Monday's North Carolina ruling was moot. Long apparently can approve whoever he wants, regardless of the ordered review before certification.
Why the speedy certification of the three companies? Because time is of the essence:
That means counties need to meet a Jan. 20 deadline to contract with a vendor. The machines will be demonstrated at four locations statewide the week of Dec. 12.
Just two weeks, Long told the Greensboro News-Record:
"[Diebold's] problem was not with [the North Carolina Board of Elections], it was the North Carolina statute."
Conveniently enough for Diebold, Mr. Long found a way to get away that problem. For now, at least.