City election board chooses controversial Diebold

The Post-Dispatch is reporting that the St. Louis City elections board has gone with Diebold as its new supplier of electronic voting equipment.

The selection of Diebold is somewhat controversial. The company’s machines have been thrown out of Leon and Volusia Counties in Florida after a Finnish security expert showed elections officials how easy it was to falsify results despite Diebold’s “unhackable technology.”

The company is also being sued by shareholders for making misleading comments about its electronic voting machine business that led to artificially high share prices. The Boston Globe reports that the lawsuit also claims that Diebold tried to conceal problems with its voting machines and was “unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products.”

Diebold’s controversial CEO resigned last week. According to The Anchorage Daily News, Walden “Wally” O’Dell, a large Republican donor, was criticized for inviting people in 2003 to a fundraiser for President Bush with a letter stating he planned to help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

An article in the March 5, 2004 edition of Mother Jones reported that one of the longest-serving Diebold directors, W.R. “Tim” Timken, also a Republican loyalist and a major contributor to GOP candidates, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to George W. Bush‘s re-election campaign. “Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates…Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken’s Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000.”

Jo Mannes of the Post reports that the governor-appointed, Republican-controlled (2-1) St. Louis Board of Elections selected Diebold unanimously. Kansas City also chose the firm earlier this month. St. Louis County will announce their selection this week.