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Bush's Last Day
01/20/2009 |
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Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 14:12:49 PM EDT
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| A Globe article in today's City/Region section tells a disturbing story.
Diebold Election Systems Inc. , one of the country's largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.
Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK , a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.
The contract is valued at about $9 million.
Galvin has dismissed the suit as being "frivolous", which it is. However, I don't think that is the point. Diebold, a huge company with so many connections to the Republican Party, it might as well be a wholly owned subsidiary, is announcing that it will start a court fight that will cause financial hardship and delay to any state that doesn't purchase its machines. |
| Jan A :: Diebold sues Mass. Secretary of State over voter machine selection |
| Diebold's legal team has requested internal documents about the process that was used to select AutoMARK. They are, I'm sure, positive they underbid all their competitors. They are certainly big enough to monopolize the market if cost is the only consideration.
"We compete against AutoMARK around the country all the time," Weisberg said. "Based on the criteria set out by the Commonwealth, we had a fair degree of confidence we'd come out on top, and nothing we heard during the process dissuaded us of that confidence."
Weisberg said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes "it's worth the time and money" of going to court to challenge the contract's award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.
I applaud Galvin for not purchasing Diebold and going through what appears to be a thorough vetting process before selecting AutoMARK. I hope the any case that comes before the court backfires on Diebold and becomes a vehicle to expose its checkered past in tainted Florida and Ohio elections and its secrecy about its software codes and internal workings. See Black Box Voting and the Brad Blog for history.
I also believe that we have John Bonifaz's candidacy to thank for Galvin's attention to this issue. Before Bonifaz made it the centerpiece of his campaign, Galvin was quite dismissive of the potential for voter fraud in Massachusetts. |
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