Voting Company Should Not Hide Behind Law

To the editors:

After reading The Crimson’s Nov. 10 article, “Student Accused of Violating Copyrights,” my heart goes out to Derek A. Slater ’05. As someone who has for many years been attempting to induce the electronic voting machine vendors to provide a reasonable amount of integrity and accountability in their voting systems, I am horrified at Diebold Election Systems’ attempt to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to further their regressive practice of hiding behind copyrights in an industry whose products are fundamentally flawed by an almost complete absence of meaningful assurance that votes are entered and counted correctly—and whose proprietary software is intended to be protected from effective scrutiny. In these systems, there are no audit trails and no real evidence that something might have gone wrong or been maliciously defrauded. Integrity and democracy must be protected, not questionable practices.

Peter G. Neumann ’54
Nov. 10, 2003