News-Record.com

The state was already poised to study reform of its laws that apply to voting machines, thanks to prior problems in other states and the new federal Help America Vote Act law. But the Carteret situation lit a fire under enough legislators that something actually got done.

The law that was produced had a lot of stuff in it, but the shorthand is this:

• Voting machines in North Carolina were going to have to meet federal and state standards. Those standards would be aimed at preventing machine failures, or at least making those failures as least likely as possible.
  
• Those standards would include the machine printing out a paper record of a voters choices and voting machine producers ponying up their source code so it could be examined in the case something went awry.
  
• Oh, yeah, this all has to be done by May, 2006.

Fast forward to late on Monday of last week, when Joyce McCloy gives me a buzz at the office. McCloy is the force of personality behind the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting group.

McCloy wanted to know if I knew what was up with this ruling in Wake County Superior Court, which gave voting machine maker Diebold more time to bid on the state voting machine contract.
I didn't, and between other stories, election day on Tuesday and an out-of-town funeral on Wednesday, I didn't get to poking around in earnest until Wednesday.

The results of that rather modest poking - aided by Joyce and some other folks in the verified voting circle - are scheduled to run in two stories, one on Sunday one on Monday.

Before you get all hot and bothered, I'm not reporting anything hugely earth shaking. Nothing on the order of, say, a lottery commissioner getting paid by a big lottery machine vendor and lying about it repeatedly. But they are items worth thinking about and questioning:

• Coming Sunday: A story regarding Keith Long, the contractor hired by the state to help them solicit and vet bids for new voting machines. According to his resume, which was here but not there when I looked Saturday night (cashed version here), Long has worked for Diebold and other voting machine vendors. To be clear: he disclosed that involvement very well and I don't think anyone is saying he didn't. But it's worth noting.
• Coming Monday: Coming Sunday: Some details on that court order that got my attention in the first place.

Aside from Joyce, there are a couple "thank yous" I should note:

• David Allen, the author of the Institute for Creative Thought Crimes blog, has been dogging this issue for a while. His quotes will show up in at least one of my stories.
  
• Justin Moore is a computer science grad student at Duke who has testified before the General Assembly on this topic. He raised some interesting "what ifs" related to the law suit.
  
• Also, the folks at the State Board of Elections were actually fairly forth-right in answering my questions. Gary Bartlett went out of his way to make Long available to me and Long took the time to answer my questions twice (once on Thursday, once on Friday).

Final notes on all this: McCloy, Allen and Moore all have a pretty specific point of view on computerized voting machines, even ones with safeguards - they don't like them and think they're prone to error and vulnerable to being tampered with. And history to date has given them some pretty fine examples to fall back on.

That said, there are people (like the folks at the board of elections) who do put their faith in the new technology and think that elections are going to become unwieldy to handle without computers. They even say that other voting systems are more vulnerable to mistakes and tampering.

In North Carolina, that debate is, to a certain extent, over. The General Assembly has decided that computerized voting machines, with some safeguards, will be allowed.

The question now is what rules will govern those machines and who will be enforcing those rules. Those are the broader topics Sunday's and Monday's stories get at.