Diebold finally rids itself of electronic voting business

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.