Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Well, in case you think this is funny, according to a wikipedia article:

“Election Systems & Software (ES&S) (40-50%) and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) (30-35%) were responsible for the integrity and processing of around 80% of United States election voting. Between them, these two companies alone provide voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, the counting and tabulation of the votes, and the final reporting of the results for over 150 million Americans.”

Among many frankly frightening stories,

Chuck Hagel, the previous chairman of ES&S, another major manufacturer of voting machines and still a $1m stock-holder in McCarthy & Co which owns a quarter of ES&S , became a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1996. Hagel’s Democratic opponent made a formal protest to the state of Nebraska over the conflict of interest. Hagel had significant AIS holdings when the company counted the votes for his surprise election victory. Hagel has been scrutinized by the Senate Ethics Committee over his investments in the McCarthy Group. ES&S, which counted 80% of Hagel’s winning votes when he was elected in 1996 and re-elected in 2002, is a subsidiary of the McCarthy Group, according to The Hill.

When Hagel stepped down as head of this company to compete for the Senate, he became “…the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state … including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican”.

Hagel also was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee, and was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential candidates.

Jeb Bush’s first choice as running mate in 1998 was Sandra Mortham, a paid lobbyist for ES&S who received a commission for every county that bought its touch-screen machines.

Not to mention¹ that during the 2000 Presidential election:

…an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible. Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a “faulty memory chip,” which [Bev] Harris claims is simply not credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold’s new machines can be hacked with relative ease. The crackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents [from Diebold's technical support database] on various web sites — documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this “wholesale reproduction” of company material.”

“If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears.”

These machines don’t produce an auditable paper trail to check the votes and voters’ intentions, We seem to recall that, asked in the interest of transparency to share information about its software, systems and algorithms etc. Diebold refused on the grounds that they were “commercial in confidence”. So the results declared by the voting machine companies are unquestionable and unchallengeable.

Meanwhile, thousands of Diebold staff emails were released some time ago, showing that it was a very simple matter to access the machines’ databases and tamper with the results.

Diebold Election Systems principal engineer R&D Ken Clark – then working for Global Election Systems before Diebold took the company over – responded to an internal query over a security problem…[In an email he confirms]:
- That anyone using an off-the-shelf copy of Microsoft Access can freely open and alter the election tally database;
- That in doing so they can also edit the audit log (which is hyped in sales literature as preventing tampering) thereby removing any evidence of their tampering;
- That these security flaws have been in place for a considerable period of time.

It goes on…and on…

The world’s greatest democracy? Probably not. That “America is the world’s greatest democracy” is the world’s greatest myth? Probably.

^{¹ Yes, well, of course we mentioned it}

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