Does this constitute a conflict of interest? Should Diebold be allowed to continue in the bidding for Ohio’s election upgrade program?
I’d be inclined to say that no matter what firm or individual is tapped to do something like this, they will have certain biases towards particular candidates or parties. Most probably wouldn’t be this overt about it, but being worried about a conflict of interest is probably not too productive since it will occur in just about every case.
I agree that no one is completely unbiased, but a major fund-raiser seems a little too biased for my taste. And yes, a major fund raiser for the democratic party would make me just as uncomfortable.
But, if I knew more about the machine, and how it might be overseen and its inner workings publicly demonstated (to the extent possible while still keeping voting confidential) I might change my mind.
It is clear that there is widespread vote fraud happening with Republican-leaning voting machines; Hagel and Chambliss are good examples. To see someone so blatantly announcing that they plan to take part in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the voters of Ohio, well, you just have to admire the chutzpah of these Republican criminals.
Vote fraud is only a chip away:
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474
Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own
company’s computer-controlled voting machines showed he’d won
stunning and unexpected victories in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel’s “Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election.” According to Bev Harris, author of “Black Box Voting,” Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.
Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie
Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel
“was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on
November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest
political victory in the history of Nebraska.” What the site fails to
disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by
computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company
affiliated with Hagel: built by that company; programmed by that
company; chips supplied by that company.
“This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was,” said Hagel’s
Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka
(www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). “They say Hagel
shocked the world, but he didn’t shock me.”
Call your congressman and ask for his support on HR 2239 which specifies that there will be a paper trail for your electronic vote.
With this law in place it won’t matter who put the machines in.
I’d ban him, and I’m a Republican. While I think that the odds of any company head actually tampering with an election are slim, why even allow such a thing to fuel distrust in the first place? Either he sells the machines or stays politically neutral. Anything else is going to leave a bad tastes in people’s mouths.
However, I might be biased by the company’s name as well - it sounds a lot like a company that would manufacture ballots with “chads” (given die sounds like a shortening of “die cut”) and I really dislike those ballots for some reason…
Make that " either he fundraises and doesn’t sell the machines, or sells the machines will staying policially netural."
Dunno. Are employees of the Ohio Board of Elections unionized? Does that union engage in political activity?
Agree that a hard paper trail is a must for any electronic voting scheme. It works well in the securities industry, and will be an important component of elections, too.
Oh, and those wishing to learn more about Diebold might benefit from a visit to the company’s website. A quick check shows that their voting solutions group was responsible for 5.7% of the company’s 2002 revenue – they’re mostly an ATM company (though voting is growing more quickly, albeit at a lower margin). Scandal in the voting solutions division, which seems mostly to have grown from the ATM products, would emperil their main business, which relies on the software being clean.
As long as the machines can be audited, and people get a copy of their ballot they can personally review and call horsepuckey on, let him sell them. The problem with most of the newer, fancier voting machines is that they are extremely insecure, cannot be audited, and the elections board isn’t even allowed to review the program code. No voting machine should be used under those circumstances, certainly not one being promoted by a political fundraiser. I’ll take bickering over hanging chads over “Well, the machine says that a 98% Jewish district voted overwhelmingly for the Aryan Nation candidate, and we can’t recount, so it must be true.”
So, you would argue that they wouldn’t risk rigging elections because it might hurt their profits?
It looks like the members of the County Boards of Directors are elected or appointed for fixed terms and the six members are evenly split among democrats and republicans.
http://www.electionohio.com/boe.asp
Compare that with the members of the board of Diebold, who gave political contributions exclusively to the Republican party:
Board of Directors
Louis V. Bockius III (2,4,5)
6/28/00 $15,000.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
11/3/00 $10,000.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/9/97 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
10/9/97 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
Christopher M. Connor Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Sherwin-Williams
Company
5/22/00 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
3/30/00 $1,000.00 — DEWINE FOR US SENATE
Gale S. Fitzgerald (2, 6)
President and Chief Executive Officer , QP Group, Inc.
7/12/00 $500.00 — NEW YORK REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN
COMM.
10/12/98 $200.00 — FRIENDS OF JOHN LAFALCE
10/18/99 $1,000.00 — BUSH FOR PRESIDENT INC
Donald R. Gant (1,3,5) Senior Director, The Goldman Sachs Group, L.P.
L. Lindsey Halstead (2,3,6) Retired Chairman of the Board, Ford of Europe
12/22/98 $500.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT’L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
1/23/97 $500.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
5/27/97 $200.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/31/97 $500.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
12/28/99 $500.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/7/01 $300.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
6/12/01 $200.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
11/27/01 $200.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
1/24/02 $500.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
Phillip B. Lassiter (1,3,6) Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Ambac
Financial Group, Inc.
4/16/98 $250.00 — NAT’L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMM.
9/21/98 $250.00 — NAT’L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMM.
John N. Lauer (1,4,5) Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Oglebay
Norton Co.
10/10/00 $1,000.00 — DEWINE FOR US SENATE
8/23/00 $250.00 — REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/17/97 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
Walden W. O’Dell Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer,
Diebold
2/14/01 $2,015.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT’L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
12/17/97 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
1/30/01 $3,950.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT’L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
8/16/01 $500.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00 — VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
6/30/00 $1,000.00 — DEWINE FOR US SENATE
Eric J. RoordaFormer Chairman, Procomp Amazonia Industria Eletronica, S.A.
W.R. Timken Jr. (2,3,4) Chairman , The Timken Company
6/23/00 $50,000.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT’L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
6/8/01 $100,000.00 — 2001 PRESIDENT'S DINNER - NON-FEDERAL TRUST
3/14/01 $10,000.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT'L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
8/19/99 $15,000.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT'L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
11/3/00 $15,000.00 — RNC REPUBLICAN NAT'L STATE ELECTIONS COMM.
2/22/02 $1,000.00 — RELY ON YOUR BELIEFS FUND
6/12/02 $1,000.00 — OHIO'S REPUBLICAN SALUTE
I don’t think that the CEO’s politics should be a problem at all. Diebold won’t rig any voting machines because, if it got out, they’d be right behind Arthur Anderson in the wastebasket of untrustworthy companies. There are things you do, and things you don’t do in business. This would be one of those big “don’t do” items.
We’ll start with lawsuits, move on to no more voting sales EVER, move on to a possible drop in ATM sales, it could affect their entire business. Would you, as a bank, entrust your customers money to a business that would screw with our voting system? Tough call, I’m not sure that I’d keep buying their products.
This would turn into a PR disaster for them, I can’t imagine a multinational $2B company doing such a thing.
But assuming Diebold was rigging the machines, or if the vote count was inaccurage, how would such information “get out”? It’s not like you can take the results reported by Diebold and compare the results from a second source to check for discrepencies.
As far as I know, Diebold has not made their voting-machine code open source for everyone to inspect; and according to an analysis by John Hopkins, Diebold’s code is riddled with security holes and could be easily exploited. :eek:
And by the time these lawsuits get through the courts, how many flawed elections will have been run with Diebold machines? Will the candidates who were elected under questionable results be required to step down from office, or have a “do-over” election?
Diebold isn’t a single person, there would have to be many people working on the ‘fix’ in order for it to get through to a final product. Wally O’Dell may love the pubbies, but he’s not a programmer. This isn’t exactly like having crappy code, it has to be designed specifically to benefit the GOP. That type of code would be obvious to anyone analyzing it, such as John Hopkins.
Just imagine what your cite would look like if JH found that the code was specifically designed to fix elections! :eek:
A smart system, whether it uses electronic voting or not, has manual spot-checks, comparisons to historical voting patterns, comparisions to exit polls by third parties, etc. It would be (and with the benefit of hindsight, has been) insane to trust a single system of any sort.
Didn’t read the webpage, did you? Or did you? A guy actually concerned about actual or perceived conflicts in voting system design instead of making a cheap partisan point would not in a million years have cited that study, despite its techinical merits. What’s your real agenda here?
By “employees” I was thinking more of the staff members involved in day-to-day work – the folks who could (conceivably) influence elections or election systems. Are they AFSMCE members (strongly and partisanly Democratic in most areas) or members of other unions? I don’t know the answer, BTW – this isn’t a trap or an argument. I’m curious. If you or others are proposing to disqualify a potential vendor simply because its management is dominated by members of one party (and good luck finding one that isn’t!), then you would clearly be equally interested in eliminating any partisanship from the process by decertifying partisan unions or at least banning the partisanship, etc. Yes?
The officers don’t have to actually rig the election, they just leave the back door open for someone else to come in and alter the results:
“In the course of researching “Black Box Voting,” Harris did a Google search on one of the voting machine companies, Diebold Election Systems, and found it maintained an open FTP site on the internet apparently through the 2002 election. In it, she located computer code used to tabulate elections and, apparently, actual vote count files that could be downloaded or even replaced by any visiting hacker.”
And it looks like they let the RNC in thru the back door:
The Scoop also performed a statistical analysis comparing American polls and computer-controlled voting machine results. In many states there were no variations. In a few, however, they found that “the Republican Party experienced a pronounced last minute swing in its favour of between 4 and 16 points. Remarkably this last minute swing appears to have been concentrated in its effects in critical Senate races(Georgia and Minnesota) where [the Republican Party] secured its complete control of Congress.”
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474
You said in another post above that Diebold would not rig elections because it would be bad for business if they were found out. That is a specious argument. It is like saying, “Arthur Andersen would never cook the books for corporate clients, because if they did, they would lose billions of dollars of business worldwide.” It was a bad risk to take, but they did it. It is like saying, people wouldn’t rob banks because 95% of bank robbers get caught and spend a long time in jail. Yet people rob banks.
Exactly, and that is the problem with touchscreen voting machines.
There is no paper trail.
Exit polling has faded away, so there is no independent corroboration of election results.
The comparisons to historical voting patterns see Republicans winning surprising, last-minute upsets.
Anybody who is not suspicious of what is going on here is either brain-dead or should move to N. Korea where elections are a lot simpler. Kim Jong-Il just got re-elected! What a surprise.
Poll workers are hired on a temporary basis and probably don’t belong to any union. Sometimes they are volunteers. Sometimes they are senior citizens, retirees, a real radical bunch, yeah? It varies from state to state, county to county and would be very difficult to organize any concerted effort to steal the election. How would they do it? Purposely spoil ballots that voted for Republican candidates? Not allow registered republicans to vote? OTOH, Diebold’s corporate officers have a clear Republican bias, are involved in elections nationwide, and have a very simple security flaw which can be exploited to alter the results of an election. And you are worried about some radical granmas subverting democracy? Get a grip, dude.