Reply #2: North Carolina defends e-voting certifications

[Wilms]

North Carolina defends e-voting certifications

By Anne Broache, CNET News.com

Published on ZDNet News:

December 2, 2005

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"The Board of Elections is required to review all of this code for security purposes before they certify it," said Matt Zimmerman, an EFF attorney. "If by some miracle they've actually complied with the statute, sometime between Monday and Thursday they've reviewed millions of lines of code for security, accuracy and integrity purposes."

Keith Long, a North Carolina voting systems manager, insisted that there was "nothing tricky" going on. First of all, he said, the Board of Elections didn't need to review all of the code again on its own because it made use of reports by an independent testing authority authorized by the federal government to run tests on e-voting software.

And second, after polling the companies that had submitted bids and discovering that none of them could reasonably hand over third-party software code, the Board of Elections decided at the last minute that it would allow the companies to be certified as long as they provided the state with the outside escrow locations of all the codes. They have until Dec. 22 to do so.

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http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5980671.html