This will be a short diary, but I hadn’t seen anything else about it on the site. The State of North Carolina asked voting machine companies to reveal all parties with an ownership stake of more than five percent. Almost all refused to do so, saying this was “proprietary information” and might affect the value of the company.
www.techdirt.com/…
I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t this tantamount to saying that if anybody knew who the owners were, they might call the credibility of the company into question? And is there any law that restricts ownership to Americans or American entities? Could Diebold or ES&S actually have part ownership by Russian firms, sufficient that the stakeholder would have access to the software? This seems like a situation that the Democratic House should address immediately, preferably with astronomical fines for any company that either conspires to tamper with vote integrity or is careless with systems so they can be easily hacked. I would love to hear the Republicans’ excuses for not supporting that...
In an ideal world, I’d like to see a Democratic individual or organization very publicly offer a one million dollar reward to any whistleblower who provides information to law enforcement that results in convictions for electronic vote tampering. There are a lot of software engineers who have worked on those machines, and if any were complicit then this might lead them to have a change of heart. Since that money would only be paid out in the case of a conviction or guilty plea, it would be well spent.