Diebold 'offices' listed in yellow pages are mostly Wal-Marts Joe Byrne

Published: Sunday February 22, 2009





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Across the country, curious bloggers are calling up their local Diebold offices, and no one is answering.



Utah is among the number of states that now use a partial or fully electronic election system, and Premier Election Solutions, a subsidiary of Diebold, is the company that sold the machines to the state. To convince Utah decision-makers that Diebold was a big company with a substantial presence, Kathy Dopp, founder of UtahCountVotes.org, reported that a company representative told the decision-makers in 2006 that Diebold has about 20 offices in Utah. When pressed further, the representative refused to give the locations of any of the offices. In fact, the White Pages lists 18 Diebold offices.



However, when calls were made to all of these offices, only one picked up the phone. And when the addresses of offices listed under Diebold in the White Pages were visited, the addresses turned out to belong to either a Wal-Mart, a Sam's Club, or no building at all. In the end, 16 of the 18 Diebold offices in Utah listed in the White Pages were false listings. One is in Salt Lake, and the other is in Bountiful.



A quick investigation by Bob Fertik on Democrats.com revealed that a similar scam existed in New York, with another Diebold listing in Buffalo turning out to be a Wal-Mart. Out of 13 listings in Florida, 5 turned out to be Wal-Marts. Similar office listings have been uncovered in Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. Since the office listings exist in each state and not just in Utah, it is probably unlikely that the corporate branch in every state is acting independently of each other.



This is not the first time Diebold has found itself under fire for questionable business practices. Shortly before the 2002 election, Georgia's secretary of state, Cathy Cox, discovered that an unauthorized patch had been installed on some of the voting machines. The state of California ordered that 15,000 of its Diebold voting machines not be used in the 2004 elections due to flaws that the company failed to disclose. Maryland's House of Delegates voted to ban the company from its electronic voting in 2006. The company has come under fire on numerous occasions for failing to protect its software from hackers.







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