Disgraced E-Voting Vendor, With Admittedly Inaccurate Voting Systems, Seen Back on the Road for the Republican Candidate in the Buckeye State...
By Brad Friedman on 9/24/2008, 11:46am PT  

Jeff Johnson at "Urban In-Fill" points us to a photo he says was snapped recently in Columbus, Ohio...

Click on the photo for a larger version, but if you can't tell, that's a truck with a Diebold logo on the side, and a John McCain sticker on the back...

As everyone in the world likely remembers by now, Diebold's former CEO Walden O'Dell was a major George W. Bush backer who, in a 2003 Republican fundraising letter wrote that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Some time after that mission was accomplished, and Diebold's 160-year old, blue-chip good name was sent into the toilet, O'Dell was jettisoned amidst several ongoing fraud investigations, the new regime claimed they would impliment new regulations barring public support for political candidates.

Guess the memo hasn't gotten fully out. Or perhaps, now that they've put lipstick on the Diebold pig (disclaimer: this article has nothing to do with Sarah Palin), by changing the name of their elections division to "Premier" in hopes of fooling America again, the parent company Diebold has loosened their restrictions on supporting Republican campaigns in Ohio and elsewhere.

Diebold/Premier is currently being sued by Ohio Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner, in the wake of the company's recent admission that the tabulator software on their voting systems --- both touch-screen and op-scan --- to be used in 34 states this November, doesn't work, and drops thousands of votes without notice to the system operator.

In late 2007, they also were forced to admit that the memory cards on their op-scan paper-ballot systems are prone to failure. The same systems which were seen being hacked, via those memory cards, in HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy (video of that hack here.)

Prior to all of that, after we had supplied Princeton University with a Diebold touch-screen system, given to us by a Diebold insider, computer scientists there demonstrated that those machines were easily hacked with a vote-flipping virus which could pass itself from machine to machine and flip an entire county's election without detection. Oh, and that their machines, all across the country, used an identical key to open them up --- one which could be purchased at any office supply store, or simply created by hand from a photo of the key as seen on the company's own website.

Other than that...Heckuva job, Diebold! Keep on truckin'!

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Article Categories: Diebold/Premier, Ohio, Election 2008, John McCain