Diebold's New Charm Offensive For Democrats!

It's delightful! It's delicious! It's delovely! It's a Democrat with paid employment!

With a phone call and a retainer, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell has launched former Democratic National Committee chairman Joe Andrew on a 50-state ambassadorship for electronic voting.

O'Dell said he ``wanted to reframe some of the issues,'' Andrew said.

That's the winning ticket!

His first stop: California, the nation's largest market for voting machines and the place where Diebold's fortunes as the largest supplier of electronic-voting machines in the nation could be made or broken.

``Even if you have tremendous success every place else,'' said Andrew, ``if you can't sell technology in California, you're in trouble.''

If you can't sell this technology they can't re-elect the Gropenator.

The rest of the voting industry is selling technology here. Millions in federal dollars sit ready for counties to put at least one high-tech, handicapped-accessible voting machine in every polling place by January.

That's a fine reward for the company that delivered Ohio's vote to George W. Bush as promised in 2004!

But in California, Diebold can't sell its touchscreen voting machine, the AccuVote TSx, nor can counties that bought thousands of the machines in 2003 used them in elections.

More than $30 million worth of TSx machines sit in three counties' warehouses, unapproved for actual voting. More than $15 million worth of earlier-generation Diebold touchscreens in Alameda, Los Angeles and Plumas counties cannot be used after January.

That would be a problem for a voting machine company that promises to "deliver the vote", wouldn't it?

Andrew said computer scientists and e-voting activists are standing in the way of a promising technology, an ATM-like voting computer with such a low error rate that more votes count. And that, said Andrew, should work to the benefit of Democrats.

We're loving that more votes count all right- it works real peachy, but the low error spin business is completely unverified at the e-voting companies insistence. Somebody please tell Joe Andrew that he may like getting the shit kicked out of him "for his own good" but the rest of us are sick and tired of it.

[...]

But Andrew isn't traveling the nation to talk about that or even to talk much about Diebold. So why is a ranking Democratic operative who was convinced Republicans ``stole'' the 2000 election working for Diebold and O'Dell, a battlestate fund-raiser for Bush-Cheney 2004?

It is Andrew's message - that paperless electronic voting is good for Democrats - and his connections in Democratic circles.

Sing it Brother Joe!
Drive thru the vote-n-go
Hack it out
Then swallow!