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Diebold Rebrands What No One Wants
Irvu writes "Diebold has apparently failed in their bid to sell their tainted elections systems unit. Unable to find a buyer the CEO of Diebold promised that the system will be run more 'openly and independently.' To prove that they are serious, they renamed it. Diebold Election Systems is now Premiere Election Solutions. They still sell GEMS, AccuVote OS and the ever-unpopular AccuVote-TSX which performed so disastrously in California's Top-to-Bottom Review under the same names. Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
"Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies. The scoop investigation concluded that: The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines. Those machines were supplied by Diebold." From Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
by Bob Fitrakis.
Link: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
More: " (Bev) Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush. Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded. Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents unauthorized replacement votes in Volusia County.
Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush. The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush."
And: "Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriegas rise to power in Panama and in Marcos attempt to retain power in the Philippines."
Two words: crooked casino.
Another group of companies who are ideally positioned to benefit from this are gaming machine manufacturers. In fact, since ATMs probably aren't as open to government scrutiny and regulation as your average video poker machine is, the gaming machine manufacturing industry is probably *better* positioned to comply with government regulation and produce a tamper-resistant system than Diebold is, and could probably fairly easily adapt one of their gaming platforms to the purpose - you sign in, you get a card to insert in the machine (good for one "voting credit"), you make and review your choices, you collect the machine-punched verification card and "voting card" and deposit both in the appropriate boxes on the way out (with the punched "ballot paper" really only being for verification and tamper-control purposes). Forget the privacy concerns - the voting cards needn't be traceable to any particular individual, and could be constantly re-coded with one-time-use "voting-credit-numbers" as they're recycled during the course of the day - and since the paper electoral rolls won't have timestamps on them, there'll be no way to tie the time of use of a particular voting-credit to a particular voter. To me, this almost seems natural and self-evident, and I'd be very surprised if there weren't gaming companies considering either doing this themselves or spinning off subsidiaries to do this themselves.