Diebold leaves NC! Woo hoo!!

http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/381151.html

One of the nation's largest voting machine companies will not sell new equipment in the state, increasing calls for changes in a law meant to make election results more reliable.

The law requires companies to disclose details about their machines' software, which Diebold Election Systems said it could not do. The company told the State Board of Elections on Wednesday it would not keep trying to sell its equipment here.

with that voting machine right up their ass.

Diebold withdraws
Voting machine maker Diebold has withdrawn its bid to sell voting machine in North Carolina. This letter from Charles Owen, division counsel for the company, outlines why. This paragraph essentially sums it up:

On December 1, 2005, the SBE publicly announced that every vendor certified faced issues with respect to the escrow of third-party software. At that time, the SBE proposed a solution to the escrow requirements for third-party software. However, after further analysis, we believe the proposed solution is inconsistent with state law. Moreover, the proposed solution fails to address the requirements imposed on vendors to identify all programmers responsible for creating the third party software to be placed in escrow.

. . . Why do you care? Well, Diebold's withdrawal leaves ES&S as the last voting machine vendor standing in North Carolina. Earlier this year, election officials were saying they thought any one vendor could handle about half the state's business. If any one company tried to handle more than 3/4 of the counties in North Carolina, they'd probably be stretching their resources too thin, the thinking went.

ES&S now has to handle every county - all 100 - in North Carolina. As of this writing I haven't talked to anyone at ES&S who can give me a good idea of what they're capabilities are or what they're plans might be.


http://blog.news-record.com/staff/capblog/index.html

Does this mean that some less populated counties might choose (shock horror) paper over machines?

Mark.