Diebold Hires Top Dem for PR Blitz The Oakland Tribune
By Ian Hoffman
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. 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.
Diebold's new charm offensive for Democrats strikes some as a public-relations gambit, a segue from mishaps and mistakes in its voting business to the uncontroversial notion of making more votes count for the elderly, minorities and disabled voters.
In three years in California, Diebold voting devices have awarded thousands of votes to the wrong candidates and broken down in two large counties during a presidential primary. Two successive state election chiefs, a Democrat and a Republican, both have rejected the TSx. Former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley suggested criminal prosecution, citing misleading statements by Diebold Election Systems executives and "reprehensible'' tactics. The state joined a false-claims suit against the company and won a $2.5 million settlement.
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?
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