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VelvetRevolution: Is Diebold the Next Enron? |
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from U.S. Newswire
Entered into the database on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 @ 15:32:42 MST |
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Corruption, Incompetence and Infighting Pummell the Company Name and
Stock To: National Desk Contact: Ilene Proctor of VelvetRevolution, 310-271-5857 WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- VelvetRevolution.us 'VR' has
been waging a six-month campaign to help expose Diebold's secretive and dangerous
business practices. The threat that this company and its practices pose to democracy
is now becoming clear to the American populace and Diebold shareholders as well.
In the last week, the company has begun imploding, their stock value has dropped
some 20 percent in the last week, and top officials are jumping off the sinking
ship. Last week, VR co-founder, Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com,
announced that a Diebold insider, 'Dieb-Throat,' was spilling the beans on many
of the company's shoddy practices. In short, that high-level whistleblower compares
Diebold to Enron, and says that the Diebold voting machines are "one of
the greatest threats ever to our democracy." The source disclosed that
a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a Cyber Alert two
months before last November's election about a serious flaw in Diebold's central
vote tabulator software which allows for a modification of vote totals through
"an undocumented backdoor" that is otherwise undetectable. Despite
this Cyber Security Alert issued more than a year ago, nothing was apparently
done about it, and the results of the election have been suspect ever since. Just yesterday, Diebold President and COO Eric Evans resigned. The resignation
came on the heels of the resignation last month of CFO Gregory Geswein. Also,
Thomas W. Swidarski left the elections division and was replaced, according
to Dieb-Throat, by VPO David Berg, who has very little experience in the field. If this wasn't enough bad news, two states using Diebold voting machines, Maryland
and Georgia, this week indicated that they want voter verified paper ballots.
However, the Diebold machines they have do not work with paper ballots, as discovered
by California officials in July, when they rejected Diebold machines which failed
a full 20 percent of the time in a recent massive test by the Republican Secretary
of State. It looks like Diebold will lose millions in these two states alone. Moreover, on Monday, the Baker/Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform
issued a set of recommendations which, if followed, would cause all states to
reject Diebold touchscreen voting machines without paper ballots or open and
independently analyzed hardware and software. Finally, Diebold is hemorrhaging with huge expenses in its elections division,
including over three million in annual salary and benefits to CEO Walden O'Dell,
millions in legal expenses, millions in retrofits, and millions in public relations.
As stated by Dieb-Throat, there's more bad news ahead for Diebold stockholders,
pointing to the failure of stock prices to bounce back quickly after yesterday's
early morning plummet. "Typically the stock would bounce back after such
a dip. This is a sure sign of a troubled company." Read from Looking Glass News - |
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