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 -
A DIEBOLD INSIDER SPEAKS! DIEB-THROAT : 'Diebold System One of Greatest Threats Democracy Has Ever Known'
http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=2516