Diebold chief pledges to deliver Ohio to Bush in '04

As Thom Hartmann noted on July 30, the paperless, unauditable voting machines being rolled out across our land (ironically, in the name of reliability and fairness) are made by companies with close ties to the Republican Party and the Bush administration, and those machines have been involved in enough suspicious election results to make a lot of people wonder just how fair and reliable they are.

Now comes word in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the CEO of one of these companies sent a letter to Ohio Republicans pledging to help deilver Ohio votes to the GOP in 2004.

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

As previously noted, the current generation of electronic voting machines leave no audit trail and no way to verify that their counts are accurate, and their programming is not available for scrutiny--although a version of the code found on the Internet by author Bev Harris (Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century) was analyzed by computer scientists and found to be full of security flaws that would allow any number of people to falsify election results. The only safeguard against such tampering is voter-verifiable paper audit trails.