Diebold, Hear This: We Won't Rest

I am choosing to participate in a campaign of electronic information distribution in order to defend the democracy of the United States. This site and many others provide access to Diebold memos that expose flaws in the company and its products.

Read the memos.

Diebold makes voting machines that are used in 37 states, but they provide no verifiable record and lack even basic protection against fraud. See Rebecca Mercuri's site and the book Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century for comprehensive information on electronic voting machines and the serious threat they pose to democracy.

See why-war.com for the latest updates on this protest.

Wendy Seltzer's response to Diebold's cease-and-desist demand provides the legal argument that this posting of information is fair use. According to the Copyright Act, "the fair use of a copyrighted work ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, ... or research, is not an infringement of copyright."

Participate in This Protest

Join me in protecting democracy by keeping this information in the open.

To post a copy of this entire site including this page, you will need about 150 megabytes of space. Just follow these three steps:

  1. Download diebold.zip and put it on your website.
  2. Unzip the file in your website directory.
  3. Move the diebold.zip file into the newly created "diebold" directory.

Or, you can download just the archive of messages (about 7.7 megabytes) and post it on your own website.

After you have posted the materials, send a link to info@why-war.com.

Excerpts from the Diebold Memos

"Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed." [source]

"For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo." [source]

"I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations." [source]

Tamper-Prone Machine
Diebold voting machines are used in 37 states and
lack even basic protection against election fraud.
"I feel that over the next year, if the current management team stays in place, the Global working environment will continue to be a chaotic mess. Global management has and will be doing the best to keep their jobs at the expense of employees. Unrealistic goals will be placed on current employees, they will fail to achieve them. If Diebold wants to keep things the same for the time being, this will only compound an already dysfunctional company. Due to the lack of leadership, vision, and self-preserving nature of the current management, the future growth of this company will continue to stagnate until change comes." [source]

"28 of 114 or about 1 in 4 precincts called in this AM with either memory card issues "please re-insert", units that wouldn't take ballots - even after recycling power, or units that needed to be recycled. We reburned 7 memory cards, 4 of which we didn't need to, but they were far enough away that we didn't know what we'd find when we got there (bad rover communication)." [source]

"I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here 'looking dumb'." [source]

"Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the closing of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit Log an entry for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this, to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed. However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting functionality, that would be even better." [source]

"4K Smart cards which had never been previously programmed are being recognized by the Card Manager as manager cards. When a virgin card from CardLogix is inserted into a Spyrus (have tried CM-0-2-9 and CM-1-1-1) the prompt 'Upgrade Mgr Card?' is displayed. Pressing the ENTER key creates a valid manager card. This happens in Admin mode and Election mode." [source]