Diebold’s Never-ending Voter Scams

I’ve been morbidly fascinated by the ongoing Diebold voting scam stories, and have admired the work done by bradblog and others in tracking the efforts to expose it and purge the ridiculous electronic voting machines from our elections. I was disappointed to realize that Vermont is, in fact, one of the states still using Diebold’s crappy machines, in spite of ample examples of their complete untrustworthiness. I’d always been under the impression that VT Sec. of State Deb Markowitz was pretty savvy, but on this one she apparently refuses to face the facts — or Diebold have managed to pay her enough to continue singing their praises and encourage the use of their junk.

Today, this story pops up on the radar. Apparently, Diebold convinced the Utah legislature that they were worthy of consideration because of their substantial presence in Utah, as evidenced by their many local offices. Well, someone called their bluff and checked, and it turns out it’s completely bogus: their “offices” were, in fact, Wal-Mart stores, same phone number and everything. A total scam. Then, democrats.com decided to check, and sure enough: same thing in New York state. So, today I decided to check Vermont, and, sure enough: most of Diebolds five offices in Vermont are really Wal-Marts (results via whitepages.com):

I think the word that comes to mind here is fraud — or, at the very least, misrepresentation. Either way, isn’t it a little disturbing to find that the company which is largely in control of the accuracy of Vermont’s election process is cheating? I mean, if I found out that my accountant cooked the books a little on the side, I’d ditch him. If people are caught having doctored up their CV to look more impressive than it really is, then they usually get fired. How is this different?  One commenter over at Rawstory claims that the overlap is due to a Diebold “service locations” residing at their large customers. That may be so, but if — as they apparently did in Utah — they try to use their “vast number of offices” as an argument to convince gullible suckers like Deb Markowitz about what a wonderful company they are and what a great product they have to offer, then you have to question what a “service location” really represents.