Diebold Dissolves, Re-Forms

Diebold Election Systems manufactures voting systems, both optical scan and touch-screen, that have been the subject of much criticism. The North Canton, Ohio-based company is the largest manufacturer of touch-screen voting systems. It has been plagued from the beginning by criticisms of the integrity of both its management and its voting machines.

In 2003, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell sent out a fundraising letter for Bush/Cheney '04 in which he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." In the resulting kerfuffle, O'Dell was forced to eat generous helpings of crow and Diebold was forced to amend its corporate ethics policy to prohibit senior management from engaging in partisan political activity. Now, I am a big believer in freedom of speech, especially political speech, but one has to be careful about the appearance of impropriety when one makes impolitic statements like that.


More problematic than that was the fact that Diebold's machines are just not very secure. In 2004, the folks at Black Box Voting produced a video of a chimp named Baxter hacking into a Diebold machine and erasing the vote results. To the best of my knowledge, Baxter (above) was never prosecuted for monkeying around with the machines. Sorry, I could not resist.

In 2006, the Huffington Post showed how to hack a Diebold machine with a Phillips head screwdriver and a small flash drive like you have on your keyring -- and leave no trace behind.

This summer, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen exhaustively examined several voting system technologies, including Diebold's, and de-certified Diebold's, subject to the company making multiple changes to its system hardware, software, and handling protocols.

Apparently, enough was finally enough, and today Diebold announced that it is spinning off its election systems division from the rest of the company, and creating a new entity called Premier Elections Solutions. Diebold also manufactures ATM machines and security systems, apparently decided -- aided by a precipitous drop in it stock value over the last month -- to get rid of the voting systems part of the brand.

What does all this mean? Of course, changing the name on the product does not increase the quality or the security of that product. So the burden will still be on Premier to show it can make technologically sound and secure machines that can be used in elections without a loss of public confidence in the integrity of the elected officials who purchased those machines.

In Texas, where Diebold systems are used in seven counties, including El Paso (#6 in size) and Collin (#8), questions remain about the integrity of their systems. Add to those new questions about the quality of service and tech support we can expect during this corporate reorganization -- and how long those issues will last.