RSSDiebold finally rids itself of electronic voting business
By Nate Mook | Published September 3, 2009, 3:26 PM
If you ask Diebold, there is a such thing as bad press. For years, the company has endured brand-eroding criticism about its electronic voting machines, and earlier this year in a hearing, publicly admitted they had serious design flaws.
Now, the company can finally move on from its e-voting debacles, as it sold the business unit to competitor Election Systems & Software, Inc. for a mere $5 million.
Diebold will accept a pretax loss on the deal between $45 million to $55 million, the company said. That's arguably a small price to pay for ridding itself of a business that has linked the once-respected Diebold name with insecurity.
Diebold has been trying to sell its e-voting business for more than two years, and renamed it in August 2007 to Premier Election Solutions in an attempt to distance itself from the bad press. However, nobody was fooled; everyone continued to recognize the business as Diebold's.
Diebold's primary business is in ATM machines and security systems. E-voting machines only made up 2.8% of the company's revenue in 2008.
From the Brad Blog (4/27/06):
"So far, both the mainstream corporate media, as well as many elections officials across the country have --- to the delight of ES&S --- failed to notice the remarkably clear pattern of delinquency and failure the company has demonstrated time and again across the nation in recent weeks and months."
Or another press article from Nov. 3, the day before the last national election:
"Optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software failed recent pre-election tests in a Michigan county, producing different tallies for the same ballots every time, the top election official in Oakland County revealed in a letter made public Monday.
Is McCarthy & Co., owners of ES&S, still a major backer of Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, its former CEO and at least up to 2004 an owner of $1m in McCarthy stock? ES&S supplied 85% of the voting machines in Nebraska when Hagel first got elected out of nowhere, eight months after resigning his company post, and apparently still does, two reelections later.
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|they got bad press because democrats lost 2004 election and they blamed it on fraud, but of course no fraud happened in 2008 as a democrat won
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|There was no fraud in 2004 either unless you ask a Democrat. LOL
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|This isn't a partisan issue. It doesn't matter who won what office, our electronic voting systems are vulnerable and flawed and should be scrapped. We should use systems like Australia does: open source, peer reviewed, 100% accurate against hand recounts.
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|I don't know what Australia uses, but open source sounds good.
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