>>9954
con't.

The move seemed like a good idea at the time. The $3 billion public company, whose core products are ATMs, bank vaults and security systems, had just sold 186,000 voting machines to Brazil, where they delivered a quick and clean count in the 2000 elections.

Surely, Diebold reasoned, it could duplicate this success closer to home. "We thought if we got this right," says Thomas Swidarski, the company's CEO and president, "then we could do it across the globe."

But faster than you can say hanging chad, things went wrong. In early 2003, activists found a version of Diebold's secret software on the Internet. The code had so many security flaws that one group would later post a video of a chimpanzee changing votes.

[What secret software? Dean's GEMS software?

Weeks later, Diebold's then-CEO Walden O'Dell famously wrote to fellow Bush supporters in a fundraising letter that he was committed to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." It didn't take long for political activists, many of them already suspicious of the new voting technology, to begin diving through the company's dumpsters and picketing its shareholder meetings.

Though other voting-machine companies have also had their difficulties, it is "the dreaded Diebold," as one blogger on DailyKos refers to it, that stirs up the likes of Michael Moore. "The reason Diebold gets so much heat," says activist Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," "is not because they're any worse than their competitors. It's because we got more information on them early on."

The drumbeat of bad news has never stopped. This year, researchers have found more security flaws, and another version of the software was leaked. In Maryland, Diebold allegedly knew that some of its machines had defective motherboards but did not replace them for a year. Both candidates for governor there advised their supporters to vote via absentee ballot rather than use Diebold machines.