Voting Machine Dirt and Then Some - (Conservative Blog Slaps Diebold/NC!)

[Wilms]

VOTING MACHINE DIRT AND THEN SOME

By Ann Ryder

January 4, 2006

The chairman and CEO of Diebold resigned the middle of December, following many complaints of their voting machines over the last few years. One complaint is that their machines are inaccurate. It looks like what finally did him in was a recently filed stockholders’ lawsuit. Among other things, the suit alleges that the Company remained unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machines. The suit alleges that the Company concealed the scope of internal problems, leading to false representations of astonishingly low and incredibly inaccurate restructuring charges for the 2005 fiscal year. And a couple of days before Christmas, Diebold pulled out of the bidding to sell their machines in North Carolina. How did they get in such a sad position? Let’s take a look at what our Board of Elections tried to sell us:

In 2002, Diebold bought Global Election Systems, which then became Diebold Election System. Global was founded by three men, one of whom spent a year in prison for fraud against the Canadian government and was part of the collapse of the Vancouver stock exchange. He was first convicted in 1974 for political corruption. Another of the founders was jailed for stock fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering. The last of the trio defrauded Chinese immigrants and sold the real estate that had been posted as bond to bail out one of the jailed partners.

The staffer who handled the ballot printing for Global was a convicted cocaine trafficker. He brought into the company a fellow former inmate who had been in the slammer for computer-aided embezzlement. This embezzler became the lead programmer for the Global Election Systems’ vote-tally product that is still in use. By late 2000, Global’s voting system contained the first double set of books problem where all votes are recorded twice internally and don’t need to match. It appears to hide some forms of vote fraud. The guy quit when Diebold took over, but was then hired right back as a consultant.

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Is it any wonder that the Board of Elections (Chairman Larry Leake is himself under investigation) selected Diebold as one of the three voting machines from which the counties must purchase? The BOE hired a former Diebold employee to “assist them in picking voting machines.” Leake’s buddy to whom he had contributed campaign funds, former state senator Steve Metcalf, who resigned his senate seat after he had disgraced himself, is a lobbyist for Diebold.

snip

http://www.northcarolinaconservative.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1136230837&archive=&start_from=&ucat

[kster]

1. kick-n-recommended...nt

[Kurovski]

2. K&R for DU's conservative readers!

:-)

[Wilms]

3. Perhaps we should run this over for the liberals @ Freeperville.

:rofl:

[Kurovski]

4. A cultural exchange, of sorts.

:D

[Kurovski]

5. You never know when a lurker might see the light

and be saved! :-)