The world’s largest corporate e-voting supplier is about to become even larger. Today, TX-based Premier Election Solutions, the beleaguered and oft-failed voting division of OH-based parent company Diebold, Inc., announced they have been purchased by oft-failed e-voting goliath Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S). The move, if allowed to stand, would “consolidate most U.S. voting under one privately held manufacturer,” according to one election watchdog who has announced plans to file an anti-trust complaint concerning the sale with the Department of Justice.
Diebold, facing lost money, lost reputation, lost votes and multiple legal battles, has been trying to unload its election division for several years. Having failed at first, the company created an “independent” entity, Premier — same pig, damned near same lipstick — in hopes of regaining money and reputation, if not votes. That failed too.
But somehow, as reported today, Diebold was able to convince Nebraska-based ES&S, the nation’s largest election company and supplier of 100% unverifiable voting systems, to agree to the purchase.
Diebold says it purchased the election division from Global Election Systems, Inc., for $31 million in 2002. Today, Diebold announced it will sell to ES&S for just $5 million, plus 70% of any cash from outstanding accounts receivable as of August 31.
Unless they’ve made special arrangements already with Diebold, the people at ES&S — no stranger to lost votes themselves — may quickly be saddled with a fair amount of liability from the storied past and continuing failures of Diebold products across the country.
That is, if the acquisition, which is sure to quash any such “competition” in the market which might still exist, is allowed to stand in the first place…
Anti-trust
Shortly after today’s announcement, election watchdog organization BlackBoxVoting.org (BBV) announced its intentions to challenge the sale under anti-trust statutes.
BBV founder Bev Harris wrote that “An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most U.S. voting under one privately held manufacturer. And it’s not just the concealed vote-counting; these companies now also produce polling place check-in software (electronic pollbooks), voter registration software and vote-by-mail authentication software.”
She notes there is precedent for blocking such an acquisition in the U.S. election industry.
“ES&S attempted to consolidate the electronic voting industry in 1997 with a purchase of Business Records Corporation (BRC),” Harris says, “but the purchase was blocked by the US Security and Exchange Commission on antitrust grounds, and the acquisition of BRC was split between ES&S and Sequoia Voting Systems.”
Harris noted, in an email follow-up, that the group intends to file first with the Dept. of Justice, and is “looking at options for SEC sanctions next.”
She adds that filing a complaint with the DoJ’s anti-trust division is not the same as filing a lawsuit, but that she hopes to encourage others to file similar complaints as well.
Of the four major players in the e-voting industry, ES&S already dwarfs all competitors for market share. Diebold/Premiere is the second largest player, followed by the smaller, cash-starved Sequoia Voting Systems, and then Hart-Intercivic.
ES&S’ purchase of Diebold/Premier results in a single company, larger than all of their remaining major competitors combined, counting the majority of votes cast in the U.S..
Undermining U.S. Elections
The deal is certain to raise further concerns among the U.S. Election Integrity community whch has, for years, been alarmed by the private take-over of public elections by unaccountable corporations, and the increasing use of secret software used to both cast and tally votes. That takeover was accelerated in 2002, by the passage of the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which pumped some $4 billion dollars into local jurisdictions for so-called “upgrades” of voting systems in the wake of Florida’s 2000 Presidential Election debacle.
HAVA was a gold mine for the few private e-voting companies in the U.S., but a disaster for U.S. elections and voters.
Last Summer, election watchdog organization VotersUnite.org’s Ellen Theisen released a report titled “Vendors are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections” [PDF].
In the report, Theisen (who has guest blogged at The BRAD BLOG on a number of occasions over the years), argued that “the structure of elections in the United States — once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public — has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public.”
“If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now,” she warned, “our election structure would collapse.”
Moreover, as Theisen details in her report, “vendors exploit the local jurisdictions’ dependency by charging exorbitant fees, violating laws and ethics, exerting proprietary control over the machinery of elections, and disclaiming unaccountability.”
Over the years, ES&S has shown itself, through our own reporting at least, to be amongst the worst of all the major e-voting players when it comes to the exploitation of “local jurisdiction dependency.” The xompany has gained a reputation for “charging exorbitant fees” and strong-arming local officials who, as Theisen argues, have allowed themselves to become wholly dependent on their products to run our public elections.
That ability to use heavy-handed tactics will undoubtedly increase, as the options become still fewer for election officials set on using private companies to help carry out their public elections.
Diebold’s Liabilities
It’s unclear at this time what, if any, of Diebold’s existing liabilities ES&S will be forced to absorb in the takeover, and whether existing lawsuits against Diebold/Premier will now be extended to the new owner.
One version of Diebold’s optical-scan voting system was recently decertified in California, after it was discovered the company’s tabulating system discarded hundreds of ballots without notice. The company, as The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, had long been aware of the software failure in its systems.
A further investigation into the matter revealed that all versions of Diebold’s tabulation software, used in some 34 states across the nation, allow for the simple deletion of ballots without notice in the so-called “audit logs,” and that those audit logs themselves are not secure, and can be easily deleted or over-written, in violation of federal voting system standards.
The Secretary of State in California is continuing an investigation into versions of Diebold’s tabulators which have not yet been decertified, as well as those of other companies, to determine whether there remain additional problems with audit logs in the other systems as well. Those logs have long been pointed to, by voting machine companies and e-voting supporters, as assurance that any problems or tampering could be easily discovered post-election. Unfortunately, it’s frequently very difficult, if not impossible, for citizens, and even candidates, to review those logs — even when they work as they are supposed to.
Diebold itself is still facing a class-action securities fraud lawsuit pertaining, in part, to its election division. Diebold has been under SEC investigation since 2006, a DoJ investigation since 2007, and in 2008, it was forced to admit having overstated earnings.
In a 2007 BRAD BLOG exclusive, we detailed what appeared to be a case of insider trading at the company, when a massive sell-off was carried out by a number of company executives, all on the same day, at a nearly-historic high for the company’s stock. Share prices tumbled some 50% almost immediately afterwards, when plans for the “independent” spin-off, Premier, were announced publicly. The insiders sold at $53 per share, and the stock has remained in the $20 and $30 zone largely ever since. Diebold stock closed at $30.69 tonight, jumping 2.2% following today’s announcement.
ES&S: A Track Record of Failure
ES&S has faced its own history of failures. These are just a few that we’ve covered over the years (you can peruse many more on these category pages):
- In the Republican 2006 primary in Pottawattamie County, IA, results of several races were changed after an error in the ES&S optical-scan system was discovered, forcing a hand-count of all elections.
- In the 2006 general election, ES&S touch-screen voting systems in Sarasota, Florida, managed to simply lose some 18,000 votes in a U.S. House election that was decided by just 369.
- In 2006, polling places in eight counties in Arkansas were forced to find alternate voting systems for a scheduled runoff election when they discovered programming errors in the ES&S touch-screen machines.
- In the Summer of 2007, an investigative report by HDNet revealed that ES&S touch-screen systems were built in a Philippine sweatshop, with virtually no quality controls whatsoever. The use of the foreign plant had not been reported to U.S. authorities, as required by law.
- In the 2008 election cycle, ES&S touch-screen voting systems were among the most frequently reported to flip the votes of users while they were trying to cast votes. Reports of such visible vote-flipping — there is no way to track votes flipped invisibly inside such voting systems — also surfaced in the 2006 election cycle. In 2008, the states reporting vote-flipping on ES&S touch-screen voting systems included WV, SC, TN, and MO, among others.
- Earlier this year, ES&S agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement with the state of California, after it was discovered it had sold uncertified voting systems in several counties, while representing the systems as federally and state certified. They weren’t.
- Also earlier this year, six election officials in Clay County, KY, were arrested after it was discovered that they had been exploiting an interface flaw in ES&S touch-screen systems to change the votes of voters after they thought they had completed casting their votes.
ES&S will truly be able to say: “All Your Votes ARE Belong to Us” – NOW.
This is a real worry for all voting activists. Additionally, I’m in North Carolina, where Diebold said that they could not meet requirements of our law. If you remember, Diebold went to court to get parts of our law gutted, and failing that “offered” to help our lawmakers re-write the law to make it easier for vendors to bid.
Anyhow, I guess there is so much wrong with this consolidation that its not funny. It is gut twisting. And we get back to the deal with the Urosovich family/brothers thing.
Time to ditch the vendors completely.
So much wrong with this, I hope the lawyers pile on from around the country, I really do.
If the lawyers pile on, I hope the end result is that electronic voting is banned completely. Only once this merger is finalized, ES&S will then be one of those companies that is “too big to fail” and they’ll be rewarded with a taxpayer bailout just so the federal government can claim consistency.
Joking aside, this is extremely frightening, and I further fear that Congress will be forevermore asleep at the wheel after this, after all that will be what they will have been (s)elected to do.
Recountable paper ballot for all the world to see.
I have already referred this to Brad but no response.
Is there hope ?
“ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug 25 (IPS) – A case brought by election integrity advocates in Georgia claiming that unverifiable electronic voting, or E-voting, is unconstitutional could spell trouble for the controversial practice, as it heads to the Georgia Supreme Court for a ruling………”
More at http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48210
Hoping this chilling news is potentially gruesome enough finally unite this often fractured and contentious group of smarty-hardies – those who’ve spilled years of their lives in pursuit of transparent elections.
Really. Can’t we? Just put all our self-identifying abbreviations behind us and follow Bev Harris genius lead, here? Challenging the sale is a grand start. Gets citizen objection on the public record immediately / helps counter their controlled messaging.
This should be enough of a dangling, diamond carrot to revive us all united.
You can start by DIGGING this article. Simple task as I’ve started us off.
(Note for those who don’t usually “DIGG”: If you care about this issue and you don’t have a DIGG account, GET ONE NOW. It’s FREE, takes half a minute to set up and can make a world of difference in boosting the online readership of the articles you care about:
http://digg.com/
I notice that Brad has lots and lots of readers, but very few diggers/redditers/buzzupers. Let’s change that, please.)
“Election Integrity experts” is it just me or does this phrase sound wrong ? LOL
Once we get rid of the electronic vote, could we get better oversight on the electronic tabulation further up the chain?
I’m not confident at all about that.
Voting for registered non-voters by nefarious hacking assholes is a major concern IMO
…I should add that there was no way in hell that Bush took Ohio in ’04…no way. (if took means steal, than yes he did)
My next dig when I get around to it is going to be how many Turk nationals are running around loose in these questionable districts that have networking experience? Especially OH US 2
The two biggest things are: the media being controlled and voting being controlled. Corporations control both. Welcome to fascism.
The government’s inconclusive investigation of ES&S failed to prove ES&S voting machines caused the lost votes in Sarasota’s District 13. It did prove however is that end-to-end ES&S owns the election process. ES&S manufactures the equipment, tells the SOS and SOE how to test it, provides the test data, sucks in the votes, tallies them up, spits out the results and then sanctions the results as valid. That’s just wrong. Moreover, ES&S consistently proves its flagrant disregard of the American public each time it fails to acknowledge let alone disclose or accept responsibility for their host of voting machine failures. (See: “A closer look at the GAO’s Florida District 13: No smoking gun…Not if but when and how often” at
http://www.opednews.com/article...ook_at_the.htm)
Now comes a wider swath of control? Ignore all the above and consider the dearth of good business practices followed by ES&S (and FL’s SOS and Sarasota’s SOE and . . . ). Speaking as a techie and former election official, the damage that can be done by one techie in a company with so much control and so few good business practices is astounding. A little time and opportunity, stay smart and within the margin of error, and we’ve got ourselves a bonafide silent coup. Except this time it’s not fiction.
For some of us, for me anyway, it hasn’t seemed so damn silent. It’s been screaming at me, in fact. And, the parties seem more to be squabbling over which gets the most perks out of these rigged elections that spit out the poor and racially undesirable on top of flipping votes to whoever seems the most avid to play figurehead for the coup. Few seem to be able to sustain any interest in getting our Constitution back in working order… and that includes our shiny new president.
Lani Brown –
Thanks for your on-target thoughts.
I’d add only one point, for clarity, for those who haven’t looked into that story in detail, in response to this: “The government’s inconclusive investigation of ES&S failed to prove ES&S voting machines caused the lost votes in Sarasota’s District 13”
That study also failed to prove that it *wasn’t* ES&S’ machines that lost the votes, nor did it prove someone/something else was the cause.
Couple that with the lack of access to the machines used, as granted by ES&S, state of FL, etc., along with all sorts of other problems in that study, and we’re left with few other options than that *something* was amiss with those machines.
The upside: That problem led directly to the decertification of touch-screen systems in FL. The downside: They still are forced to see their votes unverifiably counted in secret, by corporate owned, programmed, run software, on op-scan systems.
99,
thank you for the link on the settlements
“At the time the US formally protested the move, calling it unduly provocative. Last week however it was reported that the US had reached a deal with the Israeli government whereby they would stop criticizing the settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied militarily in 1967 and now insists is the eternal, undivided capital of its nation.”
i wonder what it was the palastenians got out of that deal?
back on topic tho,
“ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug 25 (IPS) – A case brought by election integrity advocates in Georgia claiming that unverifiable electronic voting, or E-voting, is unconstitutional could spell trouble for the controversial practice, as it heads to the Georgia Supreme Court for a ruling………”
More at http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48210
this is what needs to happen all over the country and it is not only the voting companies now..it is also the vote reporting companies…see bbv middleman series
ok i dugg the story
Thanks a million, KfromI!
Brad and Lani – righto! Solid read. The only thing I would add to Brad’s response is that the GAO testing on the Sarasota ES&S iVontronic machines was largely controlled by Florida State Officials, right down to the machines they hand-picked to be tested.
Both David Drury and Sarasota Supervisor of Elections, Kathy Dent, had complete access to the sequestered machines for months after moving them to BIG JIM’S SELF STORAGE AND WINE CELLAR. In fact, we filmed Drury himself unloading and supervising the transfer the machines from BIG JIM’s loading dock to the GAO testing site until the BIG JIM security people rather forcefully suggested we move along.
For the record, openly-partisan Dent and creepy- man-boy Drury also controlled the location of the testing, and even some of the conditions of the testing. We have freakin’ reams of footage from that warehouse with the FEDS are acting like hot-tub-buddies with the very ass-bags they were supposed to be investigating.
Funny how months (almost a full year?) later, even after all that “independent testing”, the GAO released a report that says, in a nut-shell: ‘we don’t know nutin’ about nutin’ one way or the other…’
Incredible opening statements caught on tape from ES&S in the Sarasota hearing on failure of iVotronics:
FL-13 CATCH 22: ES&S’s Opening Misstatements”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...e=channel_page
Unbelievable nickle-pricks.
Also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...eature=related
(Practically ignored, never before seen explosive testimony from M.I.T.’s Charles Stewart on behalf of Christine Jennings re: proportional increased failure rate from the machines as they were prepared the closer we got to election day. Features comments and reactions from Ion Sancho; commentary by Leonard Schmiege…)
don’t mean to hijack the thread from something so important but..i just read this and thought 99 might be interested
2 things about this copy and paste
1. maybe obama is trying for the palasteinians
2. how do they get 79 comments in 1 min?
(unless they are computer generated right wing comments)
Brad Friedman –
I’m glad you picked up the “inconclusive investigation.” So far I’ve been reluctant to be overly critical of the GAO’s investigation because it started off strong with a lot of very good information. But in the end and for whatever reason GAO tested only TWO properly functioning iVotronics touch screens in a feeble attempt to determine whether or not miscalibration problems caused the high undervote. They tested TWO WORKING machines, 39 ballots and 10 miscalibration patterns. This miniscule level of testing doesn’t make sense (unless you don’t want to find the problem). And the fact that the GAO couldn’t test the actual machines that registered the high undervote count is just ethically wrong. (Some machines registered as many as 39 undervotes out of a maximum number of 66 to 121 ballots per machine.)
Jeannie Dean –
On SOE Kathy Dent. The GAO was very critical of Dent and SOS Kurt Browning for their failure to follow good/standard IT business practices. And from this voter’s perspective both Dent and Browning were more interested in the cover-up than in finding the truth. Yet Dent was voted back in for another term???
When it comes to election integrity, Brad Friedman’s coverage is second to none. I hope that those who truly appreciate the value of Brad’s tireless oversight of E-voting systems and those who would use them to steal away our democracy will consider a donation to this blog.
We don’t vote in Florida, “they” select just like every state in the South
Bigger, stronger, faster servers, with people clicking in off readers from all over the planet the minute there’s any news on their favorite subject.
I’m as impressed with Obama’s “tough” talk as I am with Conyers’… that is to say, worse than not impressed at all.
Lani ~ I know. Sort of unthinkable. And not even by a creeper, by some 30+ percentage points if I recall correctly. Undid me. Four dozen martinis and one half-shaven head later…
True, they were. But considering Dent/ Browning’s flagrant violations of numerous Sunshine Laws, and as you aptly noted, the lengths they went to “cover up”, distort, twist evidence, limit media exposure to evidence of the fatally flawed iVotronic machines – gotta say I was hoping for something a little bit more heft than strongly worded criticism. If their violations are not indict-ment worthy (and from the documentation I saw filed, Dent was riding a razor-wire-thin line, at best) – still, it was definitely enough to recommend tighter state wide regulations re: the Supervisor of Elections / Vendor revolving door employment policy; maybe justify rescinding a pension or two…
Even still, the unbelievable nauseating moxie of Dent/ Browning to counter-sue the citizens of Sarasota County for voting to mandate paper ballots, in light of and in spite of Gov. Crists’ mandatory implementation of OP SCANS Statewide, (is raging?) for years – appeal after taxpayer draining appeal – all the way to the Supreme Court.
I have a hard time imagining the kind of brass ones it takes aggressively sue in a court of law as a way to COUNTER whatever illegal, illicit activity you know you’ve been involved in.
…Reminiscent of an Ohio Congresswoman we know.
What ever happened to monopoly laws in this country???
And, yet, a monopoly with the most sacred thing: democracy and the vote!
WTF???????????????????????????
Basically, we’re slaves to ES&S. USA = ESS
E-vote machines are routinely hacked into in tests by universities/professors/IT experts/etc…isn’t that enough to ban them? I guess if it gets no MSM coverage, it ain’t happening.
Just like Sibel Edmonds and the other things we’ve been pointing out, e-vote machines BLACKLISTED from the corporate controlled MSM. Think about it: corporations (one, actually) control the vote AND the media which should be reporting on it!!!
I believe that Chuck Hagel, former Nebraska senator, owns part or all of ES&S.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall…? Let’s hope so!
Chuck Hagel used to own ES&S. It was how he managed to secure his first Senate seat (a seat that had been held by a Democrat for the prior 24 years) in 1996. My understanding is that he sold his ownership of the company later on, when it was remarked that there may indeed be a conflict of interest with him running for a seat in which 80% of the votes were counted on his machines. You don’t say!
I don’t know what, if any, Hagel’s financial stake in the company is now, though I shouldn’t think it would be too hard to find out.
Brad,
There’s a complete lack of information on the web about the hearing in New Jersey regarding Hart’s anti-trust lawsuit against the ES&S purchase of Premier, except ONE article saying the next hearing is set for November. That’s way too late to do anything about it, I would think. Do you have any follow up information or analysis of what the judges action indicates?