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In 2002 Diebold accquired Global Election Systems.

* = CEO is Bob Urosevich, who founded ES&S.

http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#discl osure

Sequoia uses the same hardware.

Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
Ownership: Eighty-five percent De La Rue, 15 percent Jefferson Smurfit Group; Smurfs are in the process of selling to Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago.

* = Sequoia bought Business Records Corporation's optical scan vote tabulation business as part of a 1997 Dept. of Justice anti-trust action with ES&S ? under a licensing agreement, both companies used the same equipment and software.

OK, I goofed with respect to Sequoia. I think my confusion was based on Diebold/Sequoia using the same hardware. My apologies to anybody at either the McCarthy Group companies or Sequoia who find their public association embarrassing.

With respect to the shared hardware, I recommend to Sequoia that they hire some reasonably honest second or third year EE and CS students to design and build some voting machines whose accuracy might be considered believable. Recording and counting votes honestly is NOT rocket science.

They might find it profitable to go Open Source; as they might be able to both differentiate their product and charge premium prices for a product whose honesty and accuracy nobody argues about, assuming that there is a market for honest voting machines and vote tabulation equipment.

We were also covered last week in the New York Times and USA Today. For many more details about the Rob Georgia story from WiredNews, download the new Chapter 9 pdf for the Black Box Voting book -- as of this writing, BlackBoxVoting.com is once again taken down, again for a bogus spam harrassment report -- conveniently, within 12 hours of posting this new chapter -- so you'll have to go to a backup site to download the chapter. The BlackBoxVoting.org site is still down due to a Diebold DMCA action.

In Chapter 9, you'll see that Diebold also seems to have lost the bug reports from Georgia and that internal memos show that six or seven patches were done, not just one. This went all the way to the president of Diebold, who at one point yelled at Rob "We don't need YOU airing OUR dirty laundry!"

Nice folks, lovely voting system.

Bev Harris Author of Black Box Voting

How to hack an election 1.12: Diebold tries to silence incriminating evidence : Diebold, maker of proven-to-be hackable voting systems, plays global whack-a-mole, in effort to scare ISP's into taking down websites with incriminating material. They used the DCMA to shut down BlackBoxVoting.org.

But the incriminating data just keeps popping back up on the Net, and Gun-and-Voting rights activist Jim March calls the bluff and challenges Diebold "Diebold: You are cordially invited to bite me. Bring it on. Make my day.. March has created a legal strategy/toolkit for voting rights activists who want to fight Diebold, a company which has knowingly - for 10 years - sold security-compromised voting technology, and whose CEO, an aggressive Republican fundraiser, has said he is he is committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. In internal memos published by Scoop, Diebold's officials admit that their voting records database is (and has been for a long time) hackable ( [anyone can] access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password ) but that this isn't necessarily a problem because It has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality. For background to this story, see my summary of Mefi posts on the Voting Fraud story, from this thread. Diebold's funky voting systems are in the process of being Certified, in Maryland and elsewhere, by SAIC, a company convicted of major frauds within the last decade and which has extensive ties to the Bush Administration, the CIA, and which proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients., and owns Network Solutions, Inc. SAIC has not, it seems, noticed the GEMS database story (see main link). If Diebold systems win certification, we can expect an awful lot of This sort of thing.

Computer security expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has some pointed analysis on the subject.

You can join the effort to demand truly secure voting systems at VerifiedVoting.Org

100,000 kb in Microsoft Access form.

Shawn Southworth

He has bounced from one certifier to another because they all keep dropping it. Whoever picks it up, the same guy ends up doing the testing.

Despite two formal public records requests, we have not been able to get hold of any copy of any certification document for the Diebold touch screen machines, and when we have called the only contact person you are allowed to call, R. Doug Lewis, he has hung up on four people in a row.

Bev Harris

You're assuming that the people who are at the center of these decisions want a fair voting system.

The issue is not whether it can be secured or not. The question is whether it can be profitable or not.

You don't need to hack one of these to abuse it.

Just be a politician who backs the company that sells them like here

1. scans of actual military records obtained from FOIA
2. accompanying analysis
3. another analysis

Secret Group Manipulates Vote Machines - The widespread use of electronic voting machines has severely undermined the integrity of elections in the United States. Behind the companies that make the voting machines is a small and secretive group of men, including a well-known U.S. senator.

Voting machine companies: Ownership disclosure, "private" vote-counting codes, potential for manipulation - This is an article about just three things: disclosure, conflict of interest and potential for manipulation. It is not a conspiracy theory or a political point of view. I think you'll agree with me: We don't care who wins the election, as long as it's who was VOTED FOR.

Senator Hagel campaign treasurer owns voting machine co. - Election Systems & Software, the firm whose machines were involved in the 2002 flubbed Florida primary election(4)-- and the recent huge flub in Dallas, where early voting had to be shut down when machines kept registering Democratic votes as Republican (See the 31 mistakes link, top of page) and the company that now makes the voting machines for most of America--is a private company that does not like to tell the public who owns it.

Because current vote-counting systems are not sufficiently protected from manipulation, and are getting less and less auditable, it is now very important to know who has access to the machines. There is no place for secrecy in our voting-counting system. Secret voting, yes. Secret vote-COUNTING, no -- in fact, it's unconstitutional.

For some inexplicable reason, the U.S. is rushing to eliminate the only physical record of the mark made by each voter, going to straight touch-screens with no paper trail. Canada doesn't allow this. Neither does Japan. Why are we so casually throwing away the only real audit trail that protects our vote?

With touch-tone screens, we simply have no paper trail for millions of votes, with private, secret, and (according to computer security experts), insecure programming for vote-counting machines that invites tampering. It takes only ONE true believer with access to manipulate the counting code.

Therefore, disclosure of ownership, flagging conflicts of interest, has become critical.

Not only that, one party is in control of making our (closed source to everyone) voting machines.

Source