Elections officials threaten legal action against supplier ES&S

[Algorem]

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/14157502.htm

Posted on Wed, Mar. 22, 2006

Summit board members angered by lack of cooperation on voting machines

By Lisa A. Abraham
Beacon Journal staff writer

Members of the Summit County Board of Elections are threatening legal action against Election Systems & Software, the company installing the county's new optical-scan voting system, if the company doesn't cooperate more with the county.

Board members became incensed Tuesday when ES&S officials refused to attend the board's meeting and answer questions about problems the company had with computer memory cards for the optical-scan machines.

Hundreds of memory cards shipped to the county did not work.

The company eventually replaced them with good cards, but only after two additional shipments of cards also failed...

[texpatriot2004]

1. Don't threaten, take legal action nm

[Patsy Stone]

2. K&R

for fair elections!

[RazzleDazzle]

3. Oh, man, these people need to hire a Diebold consultant or two

Diebold has a way of lobbying and working its magic so well on election officials that said election officials later help them cover up for their sins. ES&S seriously needs lessons on this!

[FogerRox]

4. Kn R, greats story

[Wilms]

5. .

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

6. Ohio is NC's lab rat

We heard about Ohio's problems, and caught the problem before they were shipped out to
NC counties.

We had a batch of 1,000, some tested defective so the whole batch
was sent back.

New batch to be carefully tested - so the State Board of Elections Claims.

We are on a short time frame here, but so much better to hopefully avert a
disaster than be hit head on.

North Carolina law requires the vendor to report any known problems with its
equipment, so that we won't be affected (hopefully).

See item number (4) under "§ 163‑165.9A and also note the penalty if the vendor fails
to follow all tenets of Section 2.(a)

SECTION 2.(a) Part 2 of Article 14A of Chapter 163 of the General Statutes is amended by adding a new section to read:

"§ 163‑165.9A. Voting systems: requirements for voting systems vendors; penalties.

(a) Duties of Vendor. – Every vendor that has a contract to provide a voting system in North Carolina shall do all of the following:

(1) The vendor shall place in escrow with an independent escrow agent approved by the State Board of Elections all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system, including, but not limited to, a complete copy of the source and executable code, build scripts, object libraries, application program interfaces, and complete documentation of all aspects of the system including, but not limited to, compiling instructions, design documentation, technical documentation, user documentation, hardware and software specifications, drawings, records, and data. The State Board of Elections may require in its request for proposal that additional items be escrowed, and if any vendor that agrees in a contract to escrow additional items, those items shall be subject to the provisions of this section. The documentation shall include a list of programmers responsible for creating the software and a sworn affidavit that the source code includes all relevant program statements in low‑level and high‑level languages.

(2) The vendor shall notify the State Board of Elections of any change in any item required to be escrowed by subdivision (1) of this subsection.

(3) The chief executive officer of the vendor shall sign a sworn affidavit that the source code and other material in escrow is the same being used in its voting systems in this State. The chief executive officer shall ensure that the statement is true on a continuing basis.

(4) The vendor shall promptly notify the State Board of Elections and the county board of elections of any county using its voting system of any decertification of the same system in any state, of any defect in the same system known to have occurred anywhere, and of any relevant defect known to have occurred in similar systems.

(5) The vendor shall maintain an office in North Carolina with staff to service the contract.

(b) Penalties. – Willful violation of any of the duties in subsection (a) of this section is a Class G felony.

http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2005/Bills/Senate/HTML/S223v7.html