No-confidence votes: copyrights vs. public debate.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Citings - Brief Article

ELECTRONIC touchscreen voting was supposed to rescue us from the vagaries of butterfly ballots and dimpled chads, but e-voting is turning out to have its own share of problems. And far from displaying the openness that is the hallmark of a trustworthy election system, one of the leading e-voting companies, Diebold, is using copyright Law against its critics.

Last summer a joint report from researchers at Rice and Johns Hopkins universities concluded that Diebold's software "is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts." Other critics allege that upgrades to Diebold software used in the most recent California elections had not been independently certified (a violation of state law), and much has been made of an August fundraising letter in which Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell told Buckeye State Republicans he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

In August, when hackers leaked some 15,000 internal messages and...