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Why a voting machine vendor fled North Carolina in 2005
Many states call their public record transparency laws ‘sunshine laws’ because they are supposed to allow light in to the mechanisms of government. But some flee the light like cockroaches scuttling when the kitchen light is turned on. This metaphor extends to certain voting machine vendors, specifically Diebold (with no offense meant to roaches in the comparison).
Diebold no longer exists as an independent entity but was acquired by E S & S in 2009. It’s modern incarnation, E S & S provides about 44 percent of the voting machines used in U.S. elections. Jennifer Cohn goes into detail about the manifest problems with Diebold and E S & S, both with the right wing agenda of the organization’s founders and the manifest problems the machines have experienced in elections. One of the earliest being a Diebold machine that lost 16,000 Gore votes in the 2000 election.
So you can imagine why a state like North Carolina might want to review the source code of election machine vendors before certifying them to use in the task of counting votes in their election, the sine qua non of democracy. After all, as Tom Stoppard once said “it’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting” or as a quote attributed to Stalin “it doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes.”
