Could the Next Election Be Stolen at the Ballot Box? A Look at the Electronic Voting Machine Controversy
Democracy Now!
Wednesday, August 13th, 2003

Millions of voters will be using electronic voting machines for the first time in upcoming elections and questions about their security are rife. We speak with computer science professor Dan Wallach and author Bev Harris. [Includes transcript]

Excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Bev Harris, what about the company Diebold? Can you talk about who they are, their connections to those in power, to the Republican Party?

BEV HARRIS: First of all you need to understand that the voting division of Diebold is a subsidiary. It used to go under the name of Global Elections Systems, out of Mckinney Texas, actually they were out of Canada but they called themselves out of Mckinney, Texas. Debold, what they did was they bought this small company in Texas and kind of, they didn't really merge it in particularly they just let it continue to run in Mckinney,Texas with all its same people, its same software and so forth. But the Diebold company itself is interesting, it does have very strong Republican ties, specifically to the Bush administration. They have a C.E.O. named Wally Odell He is a close crony of Dick Cheney, in fact just recently in July he had Cheney come to his house and he held a fundraiser for Cheney that raised $500,000. They have a board of directors member who is one of the Bush Pioneers. That is a small and elite group that gives huge amounts of money to the presidential campaign. This fellow's name is W.H. Timcan. You may remember that Bush had a trip to Ohio. In this trip indeed who he went to visit was Timkin and toured around in Timkin’s company, of course Timkin is also one of the directors of Diebold. And it just seems – the other thing that we noticed, we put together a spread sheet of the contributions that were made by Diebold and Diebold employees. And they have a really unusual pattern of contributions which ends up funneling literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to a few Republican candidates. Very little to any other party.

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