Diebold Folds on Voting Machines

Update: Black Box Voting is filing an antitrust complaint to challenge the consolidation of ES&S and Diebold.  In 1997, The SEC prevented a consolidation by ES&S to prevent a monopoly on voting machines.  Stay tuned.

After much attention, most of it negative, Diebold has sold off its election machine division, which had been renamed Premier Election Solutions a couple years ago in hopes of re-branding and dodging the bad name Diebold had earned.  This doesn’t really mark the end of their nefarious line of products, because it was purchased by ES&S, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, the only other elections company with a rap sheet as bad as Diebold’s.  But the good news is that because they pawned off the toxic asset for a paltry $5 million, Diebold has lost about $50 million on the company.  Granted, a presidential election is worth more than that, but tell that to the shareholders.

If I knew Diebold was going for $5 million, I would have scraped together the money from donors, bake sales, and Craigslist to buy Diebold myself, then audit that fucker.

In tribute, here is the Diebold section of my doc FREE FOR ALL! that outlines the company’s conflict of interests and includes me cluelessly crashing the Diebold offices in classic Michael Moore inefficacy.