The Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee Jill Stein declared victory Thursday in a legal fight over her effort to personally examine whether voting machines in Wisconsin were vulnerable to attacks. In a statement, Stein celebrated a Wisconsin court ruling against a “gag rule” sought by a top voting machine vendor hoping to ensure that she can not speak her mind about the result of an impending voting machines inspection. “If the voting machine corporations had their way, we’d be prohibited from disclosing our findings under penalty of law, even if we discovered evidence of problems that could have changed the outcome of the election,” Stein said. “The only reason for voting machine corporations to push for a gag rule was to prevent us from revealing any problems with their machines, which would threaten their ability to keep profiting off our elections,” she added. “It’s outrageous that we’ve had to go to court to argue that the integrity of our elections is more important than protecting corporations.”
In a ruling in December, Dane County Circuit Judge Stephen Ehlke rejected a petition by Election Systems and Software, a company in Nevada that builds and sells voting machines. While affirming a decision by the Wisconsin Board of Elections, he said the confidentiality agreement agreed to by Stein’s campaign meets the requirements of a statute prohibiting the disclosure of “proprietary information,” which includes the source code of voting machines.
Ehlke found that ES&S wanted to go too far in seeking “specific conditions prohibiting the Campaign from publicly discussing its beliefs of criticisms formed after reviewing petitioners’ proprietary information.”
Full Article: Jill Stein scores legal win against ‘gag rule’ for inspection of Wisconsin voting machines.