Diebold: New name, same bad voting machines!
“Diebold
Election Systems” are three words synonymous with the aggressive
pursuit of failure. Not only did the company badly implement a dubious
concept — unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting machines — but
it did so with determined flourish, letting its code and internal
communication leak out onto the Web;
employing as a chief executive a man who declared he was “committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year”; abusing copyright law in an attempt to quell its critics; and, among many other caught-red-handed indiscretions, deleting criticism of itself from Wikipedia.
No wonder, then, that Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal
a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!
Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling
incompetence, please say “Premier” rather than “Diebold,” because
Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems.
The name change, the company says in a press release,
“signals a new beginning” and a “fresh identity” — though in the same
release the firm concedes that it will still be making and pushing the
same sorry voting machines (machines that, as Princeton computer
scientist Edward Felten and his colleagues showed last year, are actually vulnerable to a virus-based attack).
Why the name change? Well, Diebold’s got a lot of other businesses
— it makes ATMs and security systems for health firms and for the
government, and the election subsidiary has always been something of a
sideline. Lately it became an embarrassing sideline, dragging down
Diebold’s good name. That’s why, a couple of years ago, Diebold moved
to sell the unit. Shockingly, it found no takers.
Now, along with the name change, the parent company (which will
remain Diebold) is creating an autonomous corporate structure for
Premier, further distancing itself from ineptitude. David Byrd, who
headed Diebold Election Systems, will run Premier.
The company also drastically lowered its earnings expectations for
the year. Previously Diebold expected to make more than $185 million on
elections in 2007; now, due to the “rapidly changing political
environment” surrounding voting technology (read: politicians across
the land realizing that running elections on such systems is
maddeningly stupid), Diebold says sales will drop by about $120 million.
[Flickr photo by joebeone.]
Wired News’ John Borland had quite a fun story yesterday about a new tool to track down folks who are anonymously editing articles in Wikipedia.
A CalTech grad student named Virgil Griffith developed the tool, called Wikipedia Scanner, after hearing about congressional aides who were fixing their bosses’ WP entries. The service is a database of all anonymous edits to Wikipedia organized according to the Internet addresses of well-known groups: Want to know what people with Democratic National Committee IP addresses were doing on Wikipedia? Go here. (Among other things, such folks were calling Rush Limbaugh a “racist” and a “jerkoff.”) Or check out the Republican Party’s record, including this alteration of the U.S. “occupying” Iraq to our “liberating” it. [Note: Direct links to Wikipedia Scanner don’t seem to be working right now; that’s likely because everyone online is checking it out.]
Among the many other organizations whose edits you can track are Diebold, the faulty voting-machine company; Wal-Mart; ExxonMobil; Fox News; The New York Times; and Al Jazeera.
Wired’s Threat Level blog is running a search for the most shameful self-promoting Wikipedia edits uncovered by the new tool. The leading contender, now, is Diebold’s deletions of criticisms of its voting technology — but if you unearth any yourself, be sure to let me (and Threat Level) know.
Correction: I originally called Griffith an MIT grad student; he is actually a student at Cal Tech.
::Tullycast:: 