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Is the Diebold CEO's Letter Full Text Available Online?

September 14, 2006

Bob Wyman calls for Diebold to get out of the election systems business, and he may have a case. I did once talk to a Diebold engineer and yes, he was aware of the controversy surrounding the security and lack of paper trail of Diebold machines, and yes, that was the first thing a lot of people brought up when people found out who he worked for. Bob is careful to note that Diebold's primary business is not voting counting machines: according to the Wikipedia page, the company “is engaged primarily in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems (such as ATMs), electronic and physical security products (including vaults and currency processing systems), and software and integrated systems for global financial and commercial markets.” Bob cites former CEO infamous letter to wealthy Ohio residents with, evidently, the heading "Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party." with the damning quote, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year", referring to then- and current-President Bush.

Inspired by Christopher Hitchens' investigation into former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer's assertion that Americans should watch what they say (Hitchens found that there was a context to the quote that critics of Fleischer may have missed or omitted), I looked for the full text of the Diebold letter. And couldn't find it. I don't want to suggest that the CEO did not actually want Bush to win—my guiding assumption is that he did. I'd just love to read the full text of the document if it's available, to see the quote's context.

Though they are improving, newspapers are really bad at publishing the original material from which they quote or analyze. (Or linking to in their online version. That's in part due to the fact that newspapers think the job is over once someone has copy & pasted the article into their online CMS.) Bloggers are better at this, since a link is very often worth just as much as what they feel they have to say about that link. Since this is a document we're talking about (and not other types of primary sources, such as raw data, which is harder to gather and release in a usable format, though by no means impossible), it would be pretty easy to scan it and post it online and transcribe it for search engines. But my 10-minute search, for the famous sentence, couldn't find it: has the Diebold CEO's letter been published online, and if so, can someone out there in the Lazyweb help me find it?

tag: diebold
Micah's picture

Can't help you out with the

Micah — Tue, 2006-09-19 20:46

Can't help you out with the letter, just want to note that you can find Diebold ATMs in Shanghai :)

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