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NEW DOCUMENTS FROM DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS
HAVE A STINK TO THEM
JULY 20, 2005: One late night in Texas, 51-year-old
Kathleen Wynne did something she never thought she
would consider: She jumped into a dumpster.
An ordinary citizen who had become concerned about
the integrity of Diebold voting machines, Wynne was
amazed to find hundreds of pages of documents in the
trash. Among them: internal notes and memos, planning
information, problems with equipment and customers,
price bid worksheets, staff bonuses, and financial
statements from Diebold Election Systems. It was early July, just after second quarter financials, and the Diebold elections division seemed to be cleaning house.
Wynne was a citizen volunteer then she is now
a full-time investigator for Black Box Voting, a
nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c(3) consumer protection
group for elections.
Diebold, a company that boasts of its security, had
made no attempt to shred the documents, or protect
them in any way. Instead, the company was in the
habit of discarding its internal records in various
publicly available locations—an apparent violation
of the management requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The first batch of documents is posted here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/4466.html(We ll come back to the document stash in a minute.)
DIEBOLD DENIES INVOLVEMENT IN GALLINA MONEY
In May, Black Box Voting broke the story of ACG Group, LLC, which has been funneling money from Diebold into the pockets of . . . someone.
The G in ACG stands for Gallina Pasquale Pat
Gallina. According to the Columbus Dispatch, Gallina
was caught giving $10,000 to the Franklin County
Republican Party, handed off through the Franklin
County Director of Elections. The Dispatch also
contains a report of a $50,000 donation by Gallina
to Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell s political
interests.
Diebold, according to the Akron Beacon Journal,
denies any involvement in the donations by Gallina,
pointing to Celebrezze & Associates and vowing
to fire that organization (set up by Anthony Celebrezze,
now deceased) if it is proved to have provided the
check in the name of Diebold.
Excerpts from the above news articles can be found here
(scroll down):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/7696.html Let us now dissect the spin:
1. The money was flowing through ACG Group LLC.
A few dollars may also have wandered into Gallina s pocket through Celebrezze & Associates, but the large, UNDISCLOSED cash was flowing through ACG Group LLC, an entity Diebold has not uttered a word about.
2. Who in their right mind would write a check in
the name of DIEBOLD? According to the Dispatch story,
Gallina showed up at the Franklin County elections
office with a check in hand and said “I’m here to give
you $10,000. Who do I make it payable to? Gallina
claims the money was his own.
However, another principal of ACG Group LLC is Juan
Andrade (the A in ACG). Andrade told Black Box Voting
on videotape that Diebold money is paid to him directly,
and Diebold money also goes through ACG Group, for
purposes that are largely for persuasion. (click
the VIDEO camera picture at Black Box Voting (.ORG)
and select Cook County Money Trail to clips of
Andrade talking about Diebold and ACG Group)
More details of Andrade and Gallina and Ohio money
dealings can be found here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/7638.html99 PAGES OF NEW DOCUMENTS REVEAL MORE PROBLEMS
Diebold financial documents found by Black Box Voting
investigator Kathleen Wynne reveal questionable
payments, and show that some items may have been
untruthfully reported to government authorities.
A document, first published online by Black Box Voting
in July 2004, exposes large payments to entities
investigated for unusual payments to political figures.
Black Box Voting has identified a $144,000 payable to
Lottery Services of Georgia, which was one of 16
companies found to have received “pass-through”
payments from GTECH in a 1995 probe. The same document, and others, show $20,000 per month payments to Andrade, Gallina s partner in the Diebold-funded ACG Group.
Accounts payable document:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/accts-payable1.pdf Documents also show payments to California lobbying
firm Rose & Kindel, whose executive recently popped
up with an appointment in new California Secretary of
State Bruce McPherson s administration. The payment, over $45,000, does not match the amount reported by Diebold for the same period (around $7,000).
http://www.bbvdocs.org/moneytrail/rose-kindel-pymts.pdf (copies of Diebold disclosures to California can be found here):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/4447.htmlIn another document, an executive memo, Diebold execs
admit to a culture of ethics problems, and you can
sense the gnashing of teeth as they describe trying
to explain to the Diebold audit committee about the
lying and obfuscating that went on during California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley s administration.
The memo states that this cost the company dearly,
resulting in a $3 million loss for the year.
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/confidential-exec-memo1.pdf A document from Coconino County, Arizona describes
refusal to pay Diebold s bill due to quality problems
with the machines.
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/coconino.pdf A hand-written note asks why voting machines originally sold to Canada were re-sold as new, tracing serial numbers to Mendocino County and LHS (a company that services Diebold accounts in New England.)
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/mendocino-sold-used.pdf Note that another voting organization,
http://www.countthevote.org, has unearthed other
devastating documents revealing specific failures
in Georgia in 2002.
Additional information about problems with Georgia s
Diebold touch-screens, and links to The Count the Vote
documents, can be found here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/7646.htmlThe GEMS central tabulator program has been pummeled
by computer programmers for its flawed, hack-friendly
design. Documents found by Black Box Voting show
flabbergasting pricing for GEMS.
(Click here to see $325,000 price quote for GEMS on the bid worksheet for Sacramento County, California):
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/sacramento-estimates.pdf For a company that sells its voting system to unions
(especially the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers), both security flaws and union-bashing tactics should give union members a moment of pause.
Latest security failures outlined in this one-sheet:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/general/BBVreport-1sheet.pdfUnion-squashing tactics shown in this planning sheet:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/union-busting1.pdf. (See page 3, plans to research Teamsters Local 38 as to finances, misconduct etc).
Additional documents, and analysis of the current
ones, will appear at
http://www.blackboxvoting.org throughout this week.
Folks, it is YOUR tax dollars that pays for these
shenanigans. Diebold recently achieved statewide
touch-screen sales for Mississippi, Utah and Ohio.
We may not win this battle by being polite and
working within the system. The system has been
broken for some years now.
We need to rekindle our confidence as Americans
Kathleen Wynne, an ordinary citizen, has shown
that simple actions can have lasting repercussions.
It sometimes seems that we have an inferiority
complex instead of believing in our own innate
good judgement, we continue to leave it up to
the experts.
It is the experts who got us into this mess. It
is the experts who certified Diebold and the other
machines (see
http://www.blackboxvoting.org.BBVreport for a devastating technical report showing just how
flawed these systems are.) It is the experts who
gave us the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). With this
kind of help, maybe we need to go back to basics.
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