Election officials accused of ignoring their own electronic voting laws?

Apparently, in North Carolina...

In the suit filed last week, EFF says the North Carolina State Board of Elections -- working with the Office of Information Technology Services -- certified two vendors to sell machines in North Carolina although the vendors did not comply with a new law requiring them to place all source code for a system into escrow before the machines could be certified.

The question is why election officials neglected to check? Further...

To prevent future problems, the law mandates that voting vendors place source code for "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration and operation of the voting system" into escrow and provide a list of all programmers who created the software. Breaking the law is a felony and carries civil penalties up to $100,000 per violation.

Incentives? Nope. Diebold had an excuse:

Diebold spokesman David Bear said the filing was necessary because Diebold's system uses some commercial-off-the-shelf software, or COTS, created by other companies. Its touch-screen machines, for example, run on Microsoft's Windows CE operating system. Bear said Diebold didn't have authority to escrow code belonging to another company.

"Obviously we have no problem providing our own source code; we do provide it in other states," Bear said.

Right? Sure they do. The question is whether the source code is changed after "it is provided," and before the election. Ask the Ohioans - they have an idea. The other scary thing here is that the security of our votes also rely on the Windows CE OS. That doesn't make me any more confident. The article summarizes the history pretty well.