The weirdest piece of the Diebold saga so far. By far.

[Jim March]

This is Jim March speaking on my own time, my own computer and my own dime.

I'm too pissed off right now to write while representing BBV and part of
what I've got to say might be seen as too partisan for Black Box
Voting's 501c(3) status. But I still have free speech off duty.

There has been an internet smear campaign going on for years now. Much
of it has focused on Bev Harris but it has extended to other activists
and even the single best mainstream reporter on the issue, Ian Hoffman
of the Oakland Tribune.

The smears have occurred under multiple fake names online, at
DemocraticUnderground, Slashdot, the Yahoo financial forum for Diebold,
Bradblog's comments system, Fark and lord only knows how many others.
It has sown dissention and distrust. One entire website sprung up
claiming to be activist-based promoting this stream of BS. See this
report for details:

http://blackboxvoting.org/diebold-PRmachine.pdf

Black Box Voting just posted proof that it was engineered, at least in
part, by people within Diebold. One major smear site was run by a
Diebold employee (Rob Pelletier) tied into Diebold's above-ground PR
efforts and actions at the California Secretary of State's office and
elsewhere.

IP addresses and other data have been traced linking Rob P. to malicious
activity at various sites including identity theft of activists, signing
up as names such as "The Real Pat Vesely" and the like.

At various times BBW people were able to watch this clown on his own
webcam surfing the blackboxvoting.org website while we sniffed his
incoming IP.

RobP's "activist forum" was promoted as an "informational site" to
county elections officials by other Diebold employees, esp. Steve Knecht.

The whole thing would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic and unethical.

I predict "Rob P" will be fired. But it doesn't matter. Take a look at
BBV's report on this whole mess:

http://blackboxvoting.org/diebold-PRmachine.pdf

The stuff involving the illicit PR by Rob and an unknown number of
others starts on page six. It's juicy reading although BBV tried to
treat this mess as professionally as possible given the subject matter.
But Bev also covers their "aboveground" PR on pages one through five.
There's as many ethical failures there as there is in the underground PR.

This. Company. Doesn't. Belong. Near. Our. Votes.

End of discussion.

 

[LAK]

I've heard a great deal about this company "Diebold". I would like to know who it's founders are, who owns it, and who runs it. And for who and where they have worked in the past. Who financed it's beginnings, and how it got it's "lucky contract" to do all this.

That aside, the whole concept and practice of electronic voting is a literal Pandora's Box. It is wide open to manipulation from without and within.

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http://ussliberty.org
http://ssunitedstates.org

 

[Don Gwinn]

Good Lord. . . .

 

[Jim March]

Start here:

http://www.equalccw.com/tmoef.pdf

Once you've digested THAT I'll fill you in on details learned in the two years since I wrote that. It's even wilder than that document suggests.

The issue isn't exactly "Diebold". In 2002 Diebold bought Global Election Systems Inc., a Vancouver BC-based firm founded by the three felons documented in TMOEF. In 2000 Global swallowed another firm called "Spectrum Print and Mail" - that's the one founded by Jeffrey Dean with John Elder as his right-hand-man.

They met in a Washington state jail. Elder was a coke dealer, Dean had embezzled almost half a mil from a Seattle-area law firm. Acting as the firm's accountant and programmer, he rigged their electronic accounting system to hide illicit funds transfers circa late 1980s.

Except that it may be more complicated than that.

Fairly recently, Dean was sued by a former Spectrum employee terminated just before the Global sale and a promised profit-sharing plan. In the depositions, Dean claimed that he had only been acting as the "bag man" for a series of cash diversions by a group of attorneys within the firm. They embezzled all right, invested it, skimmed the profits and planned to put the core equity back into the firm before getting caught. Except some investments puked and it unraveled. Dean claimed that he simply kept his mouth shut and took the fall for the cluster of attorneys.

He got out of prison after a four-year stint in 1995. Within two years his shiny new printing business (Spectrum, owned on paper in his wife's name because he still owed big restitution money) gets a lucrative ballot-printing contract for the biggest county in WA, King County (containing Seattle). By 1998 he actually has an office inside the King County election division where he's helping program the voting machines and is developing add-ons to the Global Election System product line, including the "VoteRemote" absentee ballot processing system that was sold to Global by Spectrum and is now a Diebold product.

He was working in the same building as the King County DA's office, using the same elevators, remarkable because for at least the last year this went on he was wanted by that same DA's office for failure to pay restitution.

Are we done yet? Ohhh no, we're just getting warmed up.

The biggest name in Dean's old law firm was Egil "Bud" Krogh. Bud was highly politically connected in Seattle but he'd had to fight to get his law license back after his felony conviction in the mid 1970s.

He was a Watergate figure - the head of the White House "plumbers" under Nixon.

:banghead:

So here's what it looks like. Dean is telling the truth, he was the fall guy for a pack of crooks. For keeping his mouth shut and doing at least two or three extra years prison, he gets rewarded with government contracts that tie him to an elections department that due to it's size pretty much owns the entire state of WA.

:banghead:

This is all extensively documented here:

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17305.html

Around 2003 the head of the King County elections office learned of Dean's criminal record and got him the hell out of there. That was Julie Ann Kemph. I've spoken to her, and both Bev and I think she was honest. She was rather brutally punished for her "sin" of speaking out about this clown, first fired and then hit with lurid false criminal charges that vanished within a month of said charges (DUI, assaulting a King County deputy) made the local paper.

The old Spectrum ballot printing plant in Everett WA is still going and still prints all the ballots for King County (they're on the Diebold optical scan system). It now proudly bears the name "Diebold" all over the front. Insiders tell us that the "spoilage rate" for blank ballots runs about 25%. This is an astonishingly high number in the printing industry in general; the average on complicated documents is more like 6% - 8%. Let's assume for a second that Diebold's actual spoilage rate is more like 10%. That 15% difference represents tens of thousands of blank ballots that nobody at either Diebold or the King County elections division is tracking according to our public records inquiries into the King County elections office.

During the endless recounts during the 2004 WA state governor's race, the King County elections office kept finding bags of up to hundreds of previously uncounted ballots, which slowly tipped the margin to the Democratic candidate whose official winning margin was 129 votes (statewide!).

Do we KNOW these "mystery extra votes" came out of the Diebold ballot printing plant's back door? Nope. Do we suspect it?

What do you think?

For saying things like this, that vote fraud has happened favoring both Dems and GOPers at various times, Black Box Voting has been shunned by the worst elements of the left at Democratic Underground, Daily Kos and the like...which also became a playground for the guy we now know to be Diebold's Rob Pelletier and his (unwitting?) fans.

 

[armoredman]

Athens, 1946, coming again soon?

 

[Mr_Dictionary]

I just don't get why this debate is still ongoing.

Any technically minded person who has spent any period of time with the Diebold equipment knows that they're a giant cesspool of security holes. I realize the government is involved, but even I believe that there must be a limit to its incompetence.

 

[the naked prophet]

Athens, 1946, coming again soon?

To a county near you. To every single county with an electronic ballot device. Hopefully there will be no blood and no rigged elections - but I think we all know which is preferable if we must make a choice.

 

[GTSteve03]

To a county near you. To every single county with an electronic ballot device. Hopefully there will be no blood and no rigged elections - but I think we all know which is preferable if we must make a choice.

But how will anyone know? This isn't about getting corrupt local governments re-elected as much as it is consolidating power between the 2 big parties on all levels. And there's no way anyone could accuse them of vote fraud this time around without more proof, at least not the kind the common folk will understand.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Voters who cannot punch a hole in cardboard with a sharp pointy object
and corrupt officials who stuff ballot boxes with phony paper will surely
find a way to mess up electronic voting, especially with little or no
paper trail. The idea that a new technology will fix fundamental flaws in
human frailty is the real problem here.

The man in front of my son last election hit "Enter" instead of "Reset"
and ended up voting "none of the above." Electronic voting is not a
"magic wand" fix to election problems.

 

[Thefabulousfink]

Keep up the good work, find the hard evidence.

We need to get that fraud Gregoire out of office before she does more damage to the evergreen state. I knew that election was fishy, but I didn't realizes just how bad it was.

 

[Derby FALs]

The man in front of my son last election hit "Enter" instead of "Reset"
and ended up voting "none of the above." Electronic voting is not a
"magic wand" fix to election problems.

I wish I had that option...

 

[MechAg94]

Sometimes you wish None of The Above could actually hold office for a period of time.

 

[Standing Wolf]

Thank you, Jim. I'm not sure I'll sleep better tonight, but thank you all the same.

 

[roo_ster]

Excuse me, while I wipe the slime from my virtual overcoat. I just came from DU and read some of the commentary about Diebold, BBV, Jim, & Bev.

If you took a raw slab of cognitive dissonance, roasted it over red hot coals of ignorant rage, basted it with the essence of foul character assassination, and finally served it on top of a mound of writhing, maggoty bad faith; you might get an idea of what DU is like when discussing this issue.

 

[NukemJim]

I realize the government is involved, but even I believe that there must be a limit to its incompetence.

While I normal try to follow the theory of not assuming malice where simple incompentcy could cause the same result, I now believe that this is malice and therefore it will not be stopped by the normal limits of incompetency.

I hope I am wrong, but I am afraid that I am not.

NukemJim

 

[gc70]

I've heard a great deal about this company "Diebold". I would like to know who it's founders are, who owns it, and who runs it. And for who and where they have worked in the past. Who financed it's beginnings, and how it got it's "lucky contract" to do all this.

Diebold started as a safe company in 1859, but today it is mostly involved in ATMs and security systems for businesses. (source)

78% of Diebold's stock is owned by institutional and mutual fund investors. 1% of the company's stock is held by insiders or "major" shareholders. (source)

Diebold's President and CEO has been with the company for 10 years; prior to that he worked in banking for 20 years. (source)

The three members of the Board of Directors on Diebold's Audit Committee include a Stanford University Professor Emeritus of Education and Business Administration, a former Chief Financial Officer of Ford Motor Company, and a former Chairman and CEO of US Trust Corp. (banking). (source)

Less than 6% of the company's revenues come from election systems. (source)

 

[Jim March]

Right. "Diebold" really isn't the issue, it's really the rogue "Diebold Election Systems Inc" division. It is run with a lot of autonomy and with the same basic management team as leftover from the Global/Spectrum era.

These clowns have trashed an age-old brand name in American business.

 

[gc70]

It would not be the first time that a large, reputable company bought a little business that turned out to be a major problem.

 

[LAK]

Thanks Jim - and gc70 - for the details.

Mr Dictionary

I realize the government is involved, but even I believe that there must be a limit to its incompetence.

Incompetence has little to do with this. Complicity is more like it.

The object is controlling elections; whether the desired frontman be "Democrat" or "republican". Money of course follows the individual crooks at all levels, and it is these crooks that should be under the immediate attention of State investigators.

Elected and appointed officials at Federal level who have been made aware of this abomination and failed to put a stop to it need to be the immediate subject of an FBI investigation, and a special prosecutor.

We need a thorough housecleaning in this country. It won't come soon enough.

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http://ussliberty.org
http://ssunitedstates.org