Why Privatizing Our Elections Is Not a Good Idea
Posted by MEC on January 20, 2008
When states buy voting machines, they often buy related services from the manufacturer: programming the machines, training elections workers, etc.
In Maryland, the state’s contract with Diebold Election Systems (now officially renamed Premier Election Solutions) includes transporting the machines from the warehouse to the polling places. Apparently, there’s nothing in the contract to prevent Diebold from subcontracting this work.
So they hired a company owned by the former chairman of Maryland’s Republican party to take custody of the machines “for hours at a time”.
These would be the Diebold machines that “produce no paper trail and have experienced glitches that have invited close scrutiny after previous elections.”
We’ve seen numerous demonstrations of how easy it is to hack a Diebold machines. We’ve seen numerous reports of Republicans using unethical and illegal means to rig the election outcomes.
But according to state legislatures all over the country, the real threat to the integrity of our elections is voters who don’t have government-issued identity cards.
