Slashdot Mirror
California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold
moby11 points to this Reuters story carried by Yahooo!; it begins "California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products."
"Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has said Diebold deceived California with aggressive marketing that led to the installation of touch-screen voting systems that were not tested or approved nationally or in California."
From the sounds of it, the person(s) involved with authorizing the installation gave in to Diebold's hype without bothering to give system a thourough inspection/review prior to making the decision. In addition to suing Diebold, maybe the AG should be looking for some heads to chop for making a bad situation[company pushing false claims] even worse[installation and failure of product]?
Actually, it would be fitting for Diebold to refuse to sell to California.
This would be similiar to when governments began sueing Ford Motor company because their Crown Victoria police cars would explode after being hit in the rear by vehicles traveling at highway speeds. When the state filed charges, Ford stopped selling them cars.
So, this begs the question,...is California still buying diebold machines? Because if they are, then this lawsuit is nothing about ensuring voting integrity.
You're assuming that there is a company with a good voting machine package available and the ability to ramp up production quickly. From what I've read, the only reason most states are even looking at these machines are because they're being forced to do so by a stupid, reactionary federal law inspired by the 2000 FL problems. Here in Washington state, our government has been aggressively attacking the voting machine manufacturers because none of them make a good product but we have to buy at least one electronic voting machine per county by either 2006 or 2008 (I forget) or break federal law.
This is a clear case of reactionary legislation mandating solutions worse than the problems.
It's a weeee bit more complicated than that.
...for a more complete demo.
:(. This crap has to go regardless.
OK.
Everybody is looking at how Diebold "Corporate" in Canton OH (the parent company) is riddled with Bush/GOP links. And that's true.
But it's NOT true of Global Election Systems, the Canadian company that Diebold bought in 2002 and renamed "Diebold Election Systems" (still based in Vancouver BC to this day). Diebold corp of Ohio had been investing slightly before buying them outright but the investments do NOT go all the way back to Oct. of 2000.
Late Oct. 2000, GEMS version 1.17.5 was released. Per Bev Harris, this was the earliest version she could find that had the "double set of books" hack in it apparantly designed for election fraud. See also:
http://www.equalccw.com/deandemo.html
Early Oct. of 2000, Global hired a new head programmer for GEMS: Jeffrey Dean.
During the mid to late '80s, Dean embezzled more than $400,000 from a Seattle law firm he was doing computer consulting for. Dean was convicted in the early '90s of 23 counts of computer-aided accounting fraud in what the court called a "sophisticated scheme".
How did he end up hooked up with Global?
He shared a jail cell with another of the founders during the '90s.
Upshot: Global appears to have been run by a genuine bunch of crooks. *Not* political crooks, just plain ol' crooks. Diebold corporate didn't do enough background checks at the time of the buyout and I doubt they understood what sort of pirates they'd swallowed.
I can't be sure of course, 'cuz maybe the Canton boys DID know what they were getting involved in. But if they didn't, then the whole "Bush/GOP connection thing" that the Diebold Corporate people in Ohio are now famous for was a deeply unfortunate coincidence and God only *knows* what's going to happen in November!
Keeerist.
Think this is unlikely?
The big MONEY in election fraud involves rigging *local* elections, esp. building projects, construction bonds and the like. And people don't pay near the attention to that like they do national races.
I suspect that's what Global was really after. And I suspect keeping a secret all the way up to the Bush White House would be...unmanagable and dangerous as hell.
Am I certain Bush is "clean" (of this, at any rate)? Hell no. I *do* know that a heck of a lot of Democrats in various places have pushed for Diebold (starting with Georgia) and I know that county election officials can use the "cheats" Diebold built in very damned easily. Guys, I've personally seen MS-Access loaded onto GEMS boxes within counties - Fresno County's elections staff let me peek at their systems some months back (but the MS-Access was an older version (97) not compatible with the more recent GEMS databases so any ill with it happened some time ago, not recent).
Anyways. I don't want to end up betting on whether or not Diebold will "win out" in "hacking contests" with county elections officials
Jim March