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EFF files suit over e-voting in N.C.

09.12.2005
The North Carolina State Board of Elections is being sued for alledgedly certifying three electronic voting systems without completing detailed, state-required reviews of the software the machines use. In a complaint filed Thursday in Wake County Superior Court in North Carolina, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a national digital rights advocacy group, alleges that the certifications were illegal "because the Board of Elections failed to perform non-discretionary source code integrity reviews prior to granting certification."

The EFF complaint was also filed on behalf of Winston-Salem, N.C., resident Joyce McCloy, who has been an e-voting activist in the state for the past several years and is the founder of the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting.

According to the lawsuit, the Election Board's Dec. 1 certifications of the three e-voting systems do not comply with state e-voting equipment laws enacted in August because the vendors were unable to provide the source code for proprietary, third-party software included in their voting systems. The e-voting law, enacted to correct problems with the state's previous e-voting rules, requires the Elections Board to hold in escrow all software used by an e-voting system so it can be reviewed for security and accuracy prior to being certified, according to the lawsuit. Instead, the board certified the systems first and said the code reviews could take place "within 15 working days of the contract award." That provision is not included in the new state law, the EFF said.

"Today's suit says that the Board of Elections simply had no power to approve systems that didn't meet the statutes," said Matt Zimmerman, staff attorney for the EFF. "You have a complete cart-before-the-horse problem here. You can't simply make up your own steps."

Gary O. Bartlett, executive director of the Election Board, said Friday that he could not comment on pending litigation.

The three vendors whose systems were certified are Diebold Election Systems Inc. of Allen, Texas; Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif.; and Election Systems and Software of Omaha. None of the vendors was named as defendants in the lawsuit.