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Colorado Decertifies E-voting Machines
mamer-retrogamer writes "On December 17, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified election equipment used by 64 Colorado counties, including machines made by Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold Election Systems. A report issued by the Secretary of State's office details a myriad of problems such as lack of password protection on the systems, controls that could give voters unauthorized access, and the absence of any way to track or detect security violations. Manufacturers have 30 days to appeal the decertification."
I couldn't find a confirmation in TFA as to which companies really had machines decertified. Our local (Boulder) paper reported this morning that of the four companies involved, only Premier/Diebold had *no* certification revoked. So that's rather at odds with the summary. Seeing that I couldn't see any confirmation of the summary's statement in TFA, I suspect that the local paper got it right.
Dig around on SourceWatch. Here's what I found:
BearingPoint was formerly KPMG Consulting Inc., the consulting division of the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002. In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq's economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688
Amoco got rid of its company name when it merged with British Petroleum, greenwashing their hands of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill.
Just for the sheer cheek of it all, the Astroturf page gives you cause to ponder at just how amoral businesses can be.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Bearing Point: I realize you're just quoting from SourceWatch, but both they and you have it wrong, and you're removing the limited context that they had.
the huge accounting firm KPMG LLP that was brought down in the Enron/Arthur Anderson scandal of 2002
No, ARTHUR ANDERSEN was the huge accounting firm that failed due to Enron. KMPG Consulting just bought a piece of the corpse: mostly the U.S./Western Europe operations of the business consulting unit of Arthur Andersen (AABC).
More detail:
The consulting division of KPMG-U.S. was spun of as a separate U.S. public company in early 2001. They then started acquiring other consulting companies (some of them from KPMG-Brazil, KPMG-Japan, etc - all separate accounting partnerships that really are not the same company as KPMG-US.)
In addition, they would also buy smaller (non-KPMG branded) consulting firms.
Arthur Andersen LLP had spun off Andersen Consulting in 1989. Again, two separate companies. After that split (and subsequent protracted litigation between Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting to the tune of $billions), Arthur Andersen started a consulting divison again, called AABC.
After Arthur Andersen fell apart as a result of Enron, different companies started buying up different pieces of Arthur Andersen - by country and by business unit. In the U.S., AABC that was part of Arthur Andersen-U.S. was purchased by KPMG Consulting, Inc. (the relatively new separate public company).
By this point, KPMG Consulting had acquired tons of firms, people, accounts, etc, and re-branded themselves as Bearing Point.
KMPG != Arthur Andersen