– Payment of millions of dollars in settlement of litigation claims for breach of contract, failure to timely deliver equipment , misleading county and state officials, lying about installing uncertified software, failing to provide working voting equipment, failure to meet deadlines, refusal to comply with agreed to contract terms.
In addition to the above, there are increasing reports of these vendors unethically exploiting and mistreating the counties who have purchased their voting systems. Just a few examples:
-- This past week a Director of Elections in a Pennsylvania county sent an open letter to state officials decrying "the mix of deception this company promulgates" and the "unsavory business practices that vendors, such as ES&S, seemingly have a deep commitment to employing"1. ES&S was demanding a usurious price to extend a warranty for their newly installed machines which the county couldn't afford. The elections official implored the state to help ensure "that voting system vendors doing business here do not have the opportunity to threaten the democratic process with such unsavory business practices."– In 2004, the Indiana Election Commission, after discovering ES&S had installed uncertified firmware in some of their voting machines, complained to the vendor: "I just think I was absolutely lied to by your CEO ... I sat in this room and you all lied to me. You’re so derelict in your duties ...". Indiana sued ES&S over their lies and misrepresentations, settling the litigation for $1.2 million.
– In 2006 the Oregon Secretary of State (SOS) sued ES&S when they threatened to withhold delivery of newly purchased voting machines if the SOS did not agree to alter the terms of the contract and meet ES&S's new demands. A furious SOS responded: " We will not leave our elections in the hands of companies that do not follow through on their obligations, and we will not be coerced into altering our contracts."
The vendors' unethical conduct and lack of integrity is compounded by the bullying behavior frequently employed in response to citizens' or officials' efforts to reveal the threats to democracy these insecure and highly vulnerable voting machines present:
– In 2003 a cadre of computer scientists demonstrated how easily Diebold's machines could be hacked and published those findings on various web sites. Desperate to cover up, Diebold sent cease-and-desist letters and shut down their sites.
– In 2006, in response to the revelation of how easily Liberty's DRE could be hacked, the CEO of the Netherlands based company threatened to sue the Dutch television station that had aired the hack. He also wrote to Dutch election officials suggesting the hacker, be arrested and detained stating "After all, his activities are destabilizing society and are as such comparable to terrorism." He further threatened to stop "cooperating" with the Dutch government if they did not accede to the company's demands. The Dutch government is dependent on the vendor for its elections because 90% of its software is supplied by them.
– After a Florida elections commissioner arranged for independent testing of its Dieblod Scanner, revealing how easily the machine could be hacked, Diebold, along with the other major vendors, reacted with a collective temper tantrum. The county still needed to acquire voting systems for the disabled community and the vendors refused to do further business with this county unless the elections supervisor promised not to have outsiders reveal the machine's flaws through any more independent testing.
Still other examples of unethical conduct are the vendors' efforts to strong arm the states' to reinterpret or rewrite their statutes in the vendors' interest.
– Sequoia regularly employs its own regulators, a revolving door practice Governor Spitzer has expressly outlawed. In Palm Beach County, Florida it was revealed that under the county's purchase contract with Sequoia, disclosure of any specifications of how the DREs operate was a third degree felony!
– In 2005 Diebold sued North Carolina seeking to evade its statute that required all vendors to escrow their software source codes, offering to revise the state's legislation in the interests of Diebold and the other vendors.
– Avante has now lifted Diebold's arguments in the North Carolina litigation, arguing in a recent email that New York's escrow statute should be rewritten or reinterpreted in Avante's interest. This past June Avante commenced a campaign to persuade New York's election commissioners to ignore New York's law, just as Avante had done. Waiting until the 11th hour to make the case, just the way Diebold did in N. Carolina, the vendor hopes the state will have no choice but to capitulate to its demands because it's too late for the vendors to comply with the law and thus forcing the state to bend to the will of the vendor.
– In June, 2007, Microsoft, whose software is used by all the vendors except the one vendor who uses open source software and therefore is the only one who can comply with New York's law, tried to rewrite New York's legislation in order to permit the vendors to continue using secret proprietary software and be able to conceal the information the public is entitled to know.
These above represent only a few examples. All vendors have behaved similarly as detailed in the memo. This is an industry that brings the understanding of "integrity" and "moral worth" and "accountability" (all criteria articulated in the Procurement guidelines) to a new low.
Failed Performance of These Poorly Made Voting Machines
Aside from the high degree of immoral and unethical conduct these vendors have shown, the products they are offering are inferior and shoddy. As is documented in this paper these machines have been the subject of thousands of complaints: excessive breakdowns, vote flipping, machines counting backwards, machines not counting the votes at all, misprogrammed machines, jamming printers, phantom votes (counting thousands of votes for voters that don't exist and didn't vote), computers crashing, the list is long and documented in the memo.
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