Diebold Insists Its E-Voting Machines Are So Good, It Must Be Illegal To Use Any Other Voting Machine

from the vote-here dept

E-voting machine provider Diebold has made some crazy statements over the years trying to defend its e-voting machines, but the company may have set a new level of craziness. ScaredOfTheMan writes in to let us know that Diebold is suing the state of Massachusetts after the Secretary of State chose e-voting machines supplied by a Diebold competitor. Diebold doesn't seem to have any evidence that anything was done wrong -- but it insists that it has the best machines, and therefore, it wants the court to award the contract to Diebold instead. Diebold's statement on the matter is bizarre, saying that since the company competes across the country it knows it has the best machines and that it's "worth the time and money" to go to court to find out why it lost. It's nice to see that Diebold doesn't mind wasting taxpayer money in forcing Massachusetts to defend its vendor picking decisions when the company doesn't appear to have any evidence at all that something illegal actually happened. In fact, they're not even claiming anything illegal happened at all. They just think the state made the wrong choice. Given the long and well-documented history of problems with Diebold and its e-voting machines, including Diebold's repeated attempts to brush off all of the damning evidence against it, it seems perfectly reasonable that a state might think twice about awarding a multi-million dollar e-voting contract to Diebold. In fact, the state is saying that security was an important point in making the decision over which vendor to select -- and the overall consensus vote was in favor of AutoMark, rather than Diebold. Apparently, though, Diebold feels someone cooked the vote against it -- which seems a bit ironic.