Blogged by Brad Friedman from the Ozark Mountains in Missouri...

In a late comment posted just this morning, in reply to the article and photos about my recent visit to Diebold in Texas, a person claiming to be an employee of one of Diebold's New England distributors believes I am "totally full of shit"...

I don't know Mr. Hajjar, nor his company, LHS Associates, and don't have much time again today, as I'm still on the road, to look into them, but I'll presume both are legitimate entities and he is the one who posted the above comment. Hajjar, according to LHS's website, appears to be their "Director of Sales and Marketing," so it's little wonder he's a bit deluded about the products his company represents and upon which his livelihood depends. It makes sense that he might be a tad paranoid about what may come in the wake of recent devastating findings out of California concerning Diebold and their shitty, hackable voting systems, as far as his continuing ability to make a living off them courtesy of the tax-payer teat.

Nonetheless, I am happy to reply to a point or two of his silly, ill-conceived screed, along with gladly accepting his invitation to debate these particular issues publicly...

The BRAD BLOG has received exclusive detailed information about a developing potential class action securities litigation against Diebold, Inc. (stock symbol: DBD). The class for the suit will involve shareholders who purchased or owned stock in the Ohio-based company any time from October 22, 2003 through September 21, 2005.

Though we are not at liberty at this time to discuss the specifics of the potential litigation and the causes of action in the complaint being compiled, The BRAD BLOG has learned that the class action lawsuit, currently being drawn up, will involve securities fraud violations and other troubling matters for the controversial company, its CEO as well as current and former members of its Board of Directors.

VelvetRevolution.us (an organization co-founded by BRAD BLOG managing editor, Brad Friedman) is seeking additional individuals and groups who may qualify as plaintiffs in the specified class. Those who owned or purchased Diebold stock, or mutual funds which carried Diebold during the period mentioned, are asked to contact LawSuit@VelvetRevolution.us where information submitted may be turned over to attorneys for possible addition to the plaintiff class.

Union groups who own or owned shares of Diebold or mutual funds which invest in the company are specifically urged to contact VR about joining the class action.

The mutual funds which are most heavily invested in Diebold are listed here. Information on "Insider Transactions" is listed here.

Diebold, Inc. is the controversial Voting Machine and ATM manufacturer who was recently compared to Enron by an anonymous company insider The BRAD BLOG dubbed "DIEB-THROAT" in a series of exclusive reports. The Internet news site, RAW STORY ran a new exclusive interview with DIEB-THROAT yesterday revealing additional details on the inner-workings of the company and potential legal issues they may face.

Shortly after our first report on DIEB-THROAT, Diebold's stock price plummeted some 15.5%. The company attributed their troubles at the time to shortfalls in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the same day announced the resignation of their chief operating officer (COO) and President, Eric C. Evans. Our source, DIEB-THROAT, challenged the company's response to the falling stock prices in the wake of lower than expected earnings by suggestion that "Using Hurricane Katrina is a poor excuse for bad products - the last time this kind of deception occurred it was called Enron."

Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell has come under harsh criticism for his statement to Republican fundraisers that Diebold he (see explanation for correction below) was committed to delivering the electoral vote of the state of Ohio to George W. Bush prior to the 2004 Presidential Election. O'Dell was part of Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers," a group of individuals who had raised at least $100,000 each for Bush/Cheney's 2004 re-election campaign.

As well, the company has been facing other mounting troubles, legal and in the court of public opinion, over their implementation of software, hardware and various Elections Systems contracts around the United States as has been reported in have charged the company may be in violation of a court order stemming from that agreement. In North Carolina, Diebold recently lost an attempt in the court system to receive exemption from parts of a state law requiring the escrow of their voting system's software source code. They were certified anyway the next day in North Carolina, and some activists have questioned whether or not the certification was done according to state law and whether or not new legal proceedings may be launched there. And in California, a debate rages on concerning the possible re-certification of Diebold's touch-screen voting machines here after some 20% of their machines failed in a recent mock election test.

According to internal "Privileged and Confidential" documents of "Attorney Work Product" originally obtained and reported by Ian Hoffman of The Oakland Tribune in 2004, an estimate of legal costs in California for the Voting Machine giant was pegged by their attorneys at $535,000 - $925,000 for just a single two month period in order to fight mounting legal troubles in the state. Diebold's law firm, Jones Day fought in Los Angeles County Superior Court to keep those leaked memos from being further circulated.

The document estimating legal expenses [PDF] lists costs in regard to the Qui Tam Action filed (and eventually settled) by election watchdogs at BlackBoxVoting.org, the costs for fighting "Criminal Exposure" such as "legal analysis of potential criminal violations" and "White collar criminal law attorney pre-grand jury investigative advice" and even costs to the firm to "Monitor selected Web sites to gain key intelligence."

Concerning the potential of a new lawsuit against the company, DIEB-THROAT is not surprised, and expressed hopes to The BRAD BLOG in a recent email that some good may come from the possibilities of upcoming litigation:

"The denial of every documented problem with Diebold's voting system was bound to unravel sooner or later. I am not surprised that such a lawsuit has developed [as] the company consistently offered Wall Street deceptive information. Perhaps with the help of few patriotic plaintiffs our nation will be saved from Diebold's corporate takeover of our right to vote - and have that vote counted free from corporate and political influence."

The BRAD BLOG will, of course, continue to follow this story as it develops...

UPDATE 12/12/05: Diebold CEO, Walden O'Dell resigns in wake of imminent fraud litigation! MUCH MORE...

CORRECTION: A reader correctly pointed out that O'Dell promised that he, not necessarily his company, Diebold, as we originally reported, was committed to delivering the state of Ohio to George W. Bush in the 2004 election in his now-infamous fundraising letter to Republicans. More details here on that letter, here....

RAW STORY's Miriam Raftery unleashes a terrific new piece today based on an interview with the Diebold Insider, dubbed as "DIEB-THROAT", who we originally introduced in our BRAD BLOG EXCLUSIVE back in September.

Raftery previously delivered the terrific San Diego CityBeat story in October on all manners of electile dysfunction since the November 2004 election mess, right on up to the recent Mayoral boondoggle on Diebold machinery in San Diego. She's covered the Election Reform and Diebold beat in various outlets for some time.

Amongst the revelations reported by Raftery for RAW from her exclusive interview with the anonymous whistleblower who has chosen to keep their identity undisclosed for the time being due to "a continuing sensitive relationship with the company":

Much more and full details in RAW's complete article here...

{Blogged by Brad on the road...}

The fight for democracy in America --- even as we still scratch our head with continued wonder that a "pro-democracy" movement is actually necessary in the United States of America in 2005 --- continues to be a difficult one. But the fight is well worth it. Even as our victories tend to come in small, but continually accruing pieces.

We're not supposed to be talking about this issue at all, 11 months after November 2nd, 2004...and yet more and more are doing so every day. The Mainstream Corporate Media may not get it yet. But the ranks of great patriots who give a damn about their country continues to burgeon as the noise in favor of an accountable democracy increases every day due to the folks like the good readers of The BRAD BLOG who take their civic duty to heart.

Here are just a few of the latest positive signs in the continuing fight for a free, fair, verifiable and transparent democracy that many would prefer we simply didn't even discuss. We will continue to do so nonetheless. The burden is well worth carrying. The rewards for doing so are well worth the effort.

Debra LoGuercio, editor of Winters Express and columnist in Daily Republic and elsewhere, makes it a hat trick with her third column in as many weeks on our tenuous Electoral System. She was haunted by the siren sounded by our first article on the Diebold insider we dubbed DIEB-THROAT, who alerted us to the Dept. of Homeland Security website where a Cyber Alert was issued last year prior to the election about the vulnerability to hackers in Diebold's central tabulator software. That vulnerability has, by Diebold's own admission, never been addressed.

In her latest column titled "E-voting fraud is an American issue" LoGuercio joins the ranks of those of us who continue to be stunned at the remarkable indifference by the Mainstream Corporate Media to what DIEB-THROAT refered to as "one of the greatest threats democracy has ever known":

Again, read her full column to find out about her response from AP and NBC affiliates when she contacted them about all of this, and see if you can find a way to help swim together with her efforts. It's well worth it, and the support means the world to folks like us who go out on a limb on these matters...even when doing so may be neither popular nor the easiest thing to do.

In the meantime, there are signs that more and more folks are taking notice of what is going on and walking out on that limb as well. C-NET's News.com ran an article yesterday by Declan McCullah headlined "E-voting hobbled by security concerns".

The first couple of grafs:

The article covers both the ongoing concerns, and the internal debates --- even amongst election reformers --- about how and when to produce and count paper ballots...or "receipts" as they are regrettably becoming known in many circles.

On the point of the difference between reformers on these issues, I hope to produce a one-page "Declaration of Democracy" in the next couple of weeks, a page on which we worked diligently at the Portland Election Reform summit. I believe we can bridge the differences between reformers on these matters to get everyone on the same page. I've been working hard on that effort personally behind the scenes, and hope to have something to show for it in the next couple of weeks. Just by way of a heads-up...So that perhaps we may be able to "swim together" on these issues.

A second article from News.com published yesterday over at ZDNet covers a similar discussion on the problems with E-Voting vulnerability and the need to open the software for inspection:

And finally, there it was yesterday...smack dab in the middle of The New York Times: a full-page ad that asks the the too-obvious questions, "Would you trust a bank that refused to issue ATM receipts? Will you trust your democracy to voting machines without them?"

The ad calls for support of Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) H.R. 550 "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005" which we generally support as a good first step towards accountability. (You can send your words of support as well to your folks in congress quickly by using Velvet Revolution's easy Email generator here.)

Here's the very welcome ad, signed by many election reformers. Amongst them, our friend the heroic Robert Koehler (listen to our interview with Koehler at the Portland Summit as broadcast on The BRAD SHOW by clicking here and selecting HOUR 3.)

To read the full text of the ad in PDF format, click it, or click here.

Let's all keep swimming...together...

If you need some added inspiration to keep up the fight for democracy, we'll strongly recommend this great song [mp3], courtesy of Victoria Parks. "It's well worth fighting for..."

In a story about Diebold, Inc. continuing trouble the Cleveland Plain Dealer's business section reports that the Ohio-based company "lost almost a fifth of its share value last week." (Trading of DBD continues flat again today with shares off some .50% on the day.)

As well as comparing the company's restructuring to the failed strategies at Enron, reporter Alison Grant picked up on BRAD BLOG's Exclusive story of the Insider we refer to as DIEB-THROAT:

Apparently, Diebold has no response to all sorts of "nonsense." Like a branch of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security sending out a Cyber Alert Bulletin prior to last year's November Election warning that Diebold's central vote tabulator was open to any malicious user who might wish to change the results of an election. Diebold failed, apparently, to offer a security upgrade even after that Alert was issued, and to this day acknowledges it as no more than an "unproven allegation."

Failure to respond to such "nonsense" seems to be costing the company dearly. And more trouble, our so-far very reliable inside sources tell The BRAD BLOG, is soon on its way...

Debra LoGuercio, editor of the Winters Express in California, takes a look at our DIEB-THROAT stories in her latest column for McNaughton Newspapers. She closes with this graf:

We're glad LoGuercio has noticed, and that more and more such folks are beginning to take notice of what we've been yelling and screaming about since at least November 3, 2004 here at The BRAD BLOG

We also join her call for refutation of the points made by DIEB-THROAT in our stories covering just some of the information that the still-anonymous source has shared with us. Those stories, if you haven't caught them yet, are respectively here, here and here. You can reach LoGuercio at this email address, and you can reach us at this one should you have any information or evidence that in any way questions the validity of our reporting or the information we've presented so far from DIEB-THROAT.

So far, that hasn't been done. As well, we are told that more coverage of our reporting from other media outlets (larger ones) is likely on the way.

Today, Diebold Inc's stock price stayed largely flat (gaining about .61%), closing at $36.15.

Last February, when we launched our "Divestiture for Democracy" campaign at VelvetRevolution.us shares of Diebold, Inc. (DBD) stock were more than $53/share. The value of the company's stock has fallen more than 30% since we began our campaign, plunging some 20% in the last week alone since our first DIEB-THROAT story.

The DV4D Campaign put America's Voting Machine Companies on notice. We let them know we expected them to do the right thing for this country and introduce transparency, security and accountability into the electronic election systems which they were foisting on a misinformed electorate.

We hope that the other major American Voting Machine companies are taking note of what is happening right now at Diebold, and before they get too excited about trouble at their competition, we hope they all understand our promise (The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR) to do anything and everything legally and within our power to hold the anti-American owners and management of all of those companies accountable for putting our democracy at grave risk through their careless and unpatriotic business practices.

Democracy is not for sale. At least it shouldn't be. And we intend to continue to do something about it. Wherever and whenever possible.

We didn't set out to write a fundraising article for VelvetRevolution, but now that we've written it, we realize, this is as good a time as any to ask for your support of VR, so that we can keep up such work to help take our great country back from the cretins and bad guys that have --- and continue to --- hijack it from the good citizens of this country.

You can make a donation to VR right here... Thank you in advance! We need it!

P.S. Today, VR placed a new ad in Washington DC's City Paper to coincide with this weekend's massive rallies there. More on the latest ad in our campaign here, but here's a preview for you...

P.P.S. Katrina Wilcox, our Information Manager extraordinaire from VR, will be Guest Blogging here all weekend from D.C. where she's covering the rally for us! Please come back soon for thoughts, pictures and even video if we're lucky from on the ground in D.C. all weekend!

Our still-anonymous Diebold Insider --- who we call DIEB-THROAT --- has some thoughts on Wednesday's sudden and stunning 15.5% one-day plunge in Diebold, Inc. share prices as reported earlier today by The BRAD BLOG.

"What a difference a few months makes," DIEB-THROAT wrote after the market close on Wednesday. "Back in July, Diebold told investors during its conference call the election revenues were sound and expected to grow." Yes, DIEB-THROAT was on that conference call. "Now all of a sudden Diebold's [CEO Walden] O'Dell tells investors of $10 million in lower revenues from election systems alone. Perhaps what Diebold isn't talking about is the $500,000 a month in legal fees they were spending in California, or the current rash of problems with touch screen systems that freeze up when votes are cast. Using Hurricane Katrina is a poor excuse for bad products - the last time this kind of deception occurred it was called Enron."

The blistering comments about Hurricane Katrina were in regard to Diebold's press release early Wednesday morning attributing much of their lowered forecasts for 3rd quarter and full-year earnings to the hurricane. The "freeze up" on Diebold's touch-screen voting machines has long plagued the North Canton, Ohio-based company, and a recent massive test of the equipment by California's Republican Sec. of State Bruce McPhereson confirmed that a full 20% of Diebold's machines either froze up or had printer jams.

When The BRAD BLOG spoke last week with Diebold spokesperson, David Bear about the California tests, Bear repeated several times times that "there were a total of 10 printer-jams after 11,000 votes were cast." When asked several times about similar statistics concerning the number of screen freeze-ups, Bear was unable to give us any information or numbers whatsoever.

The Tri-Valley Herald, however, had some numbers in their report on the massive California tests:

Those tests, the largest of their kind, led to Sec. McPhereson's banning of the Diebold TSx touch-screen voting machines in the State of California, the largest voting "market" in the country.

Amongst other problems the company blamed on the hurricane in this morning's release, they claimed, "the impact of Hurricane Katrina is negatively affecting scheduled election systems deliveries in the Gulf region, resulting in approximately $10 million in lower elections systems revenue during the quarter."

As well, O'Dell himself is quoted in the release as suggesting "operational inefficiencies" as one of the factors contributing to lowered earnings expectations:

However, O'Dell --- who took over today as President and Chief Operational Officer for Eric C. Evans who announced his resignation this morning --- didn't mention if correcting "operational inefficiencies" would include any changes to the $3,058,650 paycheck that O'Dell himself took from the company in 2004.

As well, DIEB-THROAT believes there's more bad news ahead for Diebold stockholders, pointing to the failure of stock prices to bounce back quickly today after the early morning plummet. "Typically the stock would bounce back after such a dip. This is a sure sign of a troubled company," says the source who continues to request anonymity based on a continuing sensitive relationship with the company.

More trouble in the days and weeks ahead was also predicted by DIEB-THROAT, who feels the trouble isn't as much the weather, as it is a poorly run company.

"If Hurricane Katrina was at fault this stock should go through the floor when Hurricane Rita hits. The fact of the matter is Diebold is mismanaged and unethical. The revolving door in top management we've seen in the last few months is perhaps the sprint for cover. After all who wants to be around when the feds pull back the curtain on the Homeland Security issue," said DIEB-THROAT in regard to the Cyber Alert issued last year, prior to November's election, by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) --- an arm of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security --- as reported in a BRAD BLOG Exclusive late last week.

That "Cyber Security Bulletin", little-noticed by the media, and apparently wholly ignored by Diebold when it was originally posted in late August of 2004 is still available on the US-CERT website. It warns of an "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's GEM Central Tabulator software used with its electronic voting machine systems. The security vulnerability could allow a local or remote user to modify vote tallies stored in the system according to the warning and corroborated by several different sources.

"This backdoor means that one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election," DIEB-THROAT said in our previous article. "Diebold's election system," the source added, "is one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever known."

There's been quite a hullaballoo both here and elsewhere since I posted my exclusive interview with DIEB-THROAT last Thursday pointing to the Cyber Alert from the arm of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security which warned about Diebold's hackable machines prior to last November's election. That's good. Without noise and vigilance from the citizenry, the story of what has happened and continues to happen to our Electoral System in this country will be drowned out by those who have an interest in the system remaining as is...and real democracy in America will drown along with it.

It is up to you to make sure that something is done now about what DIEB-THROAT described as "one of the greatest threats democracy has ever known." Here's a link you can use right away to alert your Congressional Representatives (both Dem and Rep!) about the problem, and ask them to support at least one piece of legislation --- Rep. Rush Holt's HR 550 --- that attempts to deal with at least some of the problems in the current disastrous system. Holt's bill has over 100 co-sponsors now, including some Republicans as we understand, and thus it has the best chance of seeing the light of day in Congress at this time. It's worth supporting.

Several Mainstream Media organizations have contacted me since publishing Thursday's story to get more info and/or interviews with DIEB-THROAT. I've done everything I can to accommodate them, and hopefully we'll be seeing more on this story soon. Then again, I was also contacted by many MSM'ers after I broke the amazing Clint Curtis story, and we're still waiting for those exposes to appear in the MSM. So we'll see what happens. Don't wait for them! Make noise yourself right now!

Amongst the notable noise out there on the net was this coverage by Mako Yamakura at the Detroit News and Free Press weblog site. Yamakura does a fine job of explaining --- in laymen's terms --- the significance of the US-CERT Cyber Alert discussed in my original article.

Over at BlackBoxVoting.org where the backdoor vulnerability to Diebold's central tabulation software was originally discovered more than a year ago, there is a thread discussing our article, its ramifications and a great deal of additional information along with both kudos and critiques for yours truly. To be frank, I was a bit surprised there wasn't more appreciation for the story originally over there, since it provided independent corroboration to so much of what they've been trying to get folks to pay attention to for so long. Nonethess, I'm glad that folks are talking about it.

A few of the notable links found via BBV's thread would include:

I'm also reminded that you can watch Howard Dean hack the Diebold GEMS Central Tabulator in 90 seconds in a video clip from CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown where Dean guest-hosted with BBV's Bev Harris as his guest.

That demonstration is also used in the short Special Edition of the Votergate documentary film still in production by our friend Russ Michaels. If you haven't seen this version of his film, released to the net prior to last November's Election, you're in for an eye-opener! Go watch it!

Also, McCamy Taylor was moved enough by our article to do up a quickie cartoon strip on DIEB-THROAT over at the Grand Theft Election Ohio website.

Lastly, for those folks who are just now waking up to unaccountable, unverifiable, untransparent privatization of America's elections by Diebold (the Halliburton of the Voting World) and others, I would recommend you:

Wanna Do Something About All of This?

Other than linking to our DIEB-THROAT article, emailing it around, and writing letters to the editor at your local newspaper about both that story and other reasons to be greatly concerned about what has happened to America's Electoral System, you can help light a fire under some Congressional feet! Both Dems and Reps! They must get to work and pass some legislation that begins to deal with this incredible threat to our Democracy! VelvetRevolution.us has made it easy to SEND A LETTER TO YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES demanding that they support Congressman Rush Holt's "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" (H.R. 550). Click here now to do it! It'll just take a minute of your time! And thanks for giving a damn!

P.S. I'll be on Pacifica's Sunday Monitor program out of KPFT 90.1 FM in Houston to discuss all of this today (Sunday, natch) at 4:15p PT if you want to listen in...

P.P.S. Arianna has asked me for a piece on this as well for Huffington Post which I hope will be posted soon over there is now posted here!

In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" --- as well as "top government officials" --- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.

Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold --- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company --- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it.

"Diebold threatened violators with immediate dismissal," the insider, who we'll call DIEB-THROAT, explained recently to The BRAD BLOG via email. "In 2005, after one newly hired member of Diebold's technical staff pointed out the security flaw, he was criticized and isolated."

In phone interviews, DIEB-THROAT confirmed that the matters were well known within the company, but that a "culture of fear" had been developed to assure that employees, including technicians, vendors and programmers kept those issues to themselves.

The "Cyber Security Alert" from US-CERT was issued in late August of 2004 and is still available online via the US-CERT website. The alert warns that "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could [sic: allow] a local or remote authenticated malicious user [sic: to] modify votes."

The alert, assessed to be of "MEDIUM" risk on the US-CERT security bulletin, goes on to add that there is "No workaround or patch available at time of publishing."

"Diebold's upper management was aware of access to the voter file defect before the 2004 election - but did nothing to correct it," the source explained.

A "MEDIUM" risk vulnerability cyber alert is described on the US-CERT site as: "one that will allow an intruder immediate access to a system with less than privileged access. Such vulnerability will allow the intruder the opportunity to continue the attempt to gain privileged access. An example of medium-risk vulnerability is a server configuration error that allows an intruder to capture the password file."

DIEB-THROAT claims that, though the Federal Government knew about this documented flaw, originally discovered and reported by BlackBoxVoting.org in August of 2004, they did nothing about it.

"I believe that top Government officials had an understanding with top Diebold officials to look the other way," the source explained, "because Diebold was their ace in the hole."...