When ES&S bought Diebold it meant that most e-voting machines in this country belonged to one company.  That's a monopoly but the government didn't seem to care.

That DRE (direct voting electronic) machines are the rule in this country is another indication that local, state, and federal officials don't really care that these machines are still unreliable, hackable, and unverifiable.

I, like many others, have been warning about the dangers of e-voting for many years.  

Here is what I wrote in 2007: "Diebold optical scanners, used in New Hampshire were decertified in California.  Not only are the company's touch screen voting machines easily hacked say computer experts, even the memory card could be accessed by using a hotel minibar key. 

"As BlackBoxVoting explained: " 'Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand-counts, the hacks showed....that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.' " 

"How completely illogical and stupid!

"While the NH primary vote count may be accurate, given Diebold's terrible history both in unsecure voting machinery and management, a recount should be obligatory in those precincts where Diebold machines were used.

"The DNC and state Democratic Parties should follow the lead of California's Secretary of State and make sure that Secretaries of State in states where counties use Diebold, ES&S and other companies whose voting machinery has come into question or been challenged anywhere in the US, require the use of paper ballots and hand counts of those ballots in primaries and the general election. If a large state like California can do it, every state can.

"No more blind trust of electronic voting machines and optical scans. The voting process is too important."

And I wrote this that same year:

"Bush stole the 2000 presidential election with the help of the Supreme Court and probably stole the 2004 election with the help of DREs.  Who knows how many federal, state and local offices have been stolen by Republicans since DRE's became the norm after 2002? DREs appeared everywhere thanks to a Republican controlled Congress passing HAVA so that Republican owned electronic voting machine companies could make billions at the county, state and federal money troughs funded by taxpayers and rig votes undetected to insure that Republican candidates won. It's time for voters to emphatically say "enough, sue the bastards!"

"John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute states: "But the overall push on this is to reclaim public control of public elections and the dangers associated with outsourcing of our elections to private companies for certain key election functions."

"...not all states have Secretaries of State like Democrat, Debra Bowen of California; secretaries of state and local registrars were wined and dined by these companies to purchase their product and these state and local officials are perfectly content to continue with the status quo, screwing the voters."

BradBlog, one of the those sounding the warnings for many years about e-voting and continuing the fight for election integrity, writes about the recent South Carolina election results:

"A formal challenge to the announced results of South Carolina's Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate has now been filed by Judge Vic Rawl, the candidate who wasn't announced the winner by the state's oft-failed, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable ES&S e-voting system.

"Rawl's official statement today reads as an indictment of the state's electronic voting system and, frankly, as a summary of years of The BRAD BLOG's oft-ignored reporting (and warnings) about the ES&S e-voting system's disastrously failed record...

"There is no basis for confidence in the results of the election, or any held on 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines. There exists no proof that Greene won this election. Period.

"We have asked readers --- and, more importantly, election officials, elected officials, and voting machine vendors --- for years to offer any evidence that any vote ever cast on an DRE during any election has ever been recorded as per any voter's intent. No such evidence has been profferred, because no such evidence exists. These are 100% faith-based voting systems, and we persist in using them in dozens of states across the country for reasons we are still unable to fathom.

"Whether the results are actually accurate or not is beside the point. It is strictly impossible for any citizen to know if they are or aren't. Period."

Another example of corporations control of this country. Under the guise of proprietary software, etc. these e-voting corporations control voting and voters cannot be assured that their votes will be counted.

An historical note about ES&S: Former senator, Chuck Hagel, (R-NE) was CEO of ES&S until he resigned to run for the US Senate in 1996.  He was the first Republican in 24 years to win a US Senate seat from the state and won by a landslide in 2002.  ES&S built and programmed the machines that recorded and counted the votes in both elections; counting 80% of the votes in 2002. Hagel still owned stock in ES&S in 2003 valued from $1 to $5 million.