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.
Here is a comment from an anonymous poster to my original bit on Diebold and Wal-Mart:
Diebold makes cash registers as well as voting machines. Probably Walmart uses them, or sells parts and service. I wouldn't get too work up about this.
Not a very helpful comment as there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Diebold cash registers in Madison County so why are most locations and phone numbers throughout the country listed as being in Wal-Mart and Sam's locations? I'll bet that these locations have Diebold ATM's, but I still don't get the tie-in.
Just to feed the conspiracy theory a bit more, Wal-Mart has a very super-secret data collection center in Bentonville, Arkansas which is reputed to be state-of-the-art!
2 comments:
Wal Mart's IT hub isn't super secret, per say. They keep in locked down because, being the largest corporation in the world, the central IT hub has influence over hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every day.
The only Retail solutions, that I am aware of, that Diebold provides is Security Services. Ergo they would not be providing Wal Mart with cash registers, though they might provide them with ATM systems.
Keep digging, Fred! This is peculiar.
But just think of all the information they're able to collect each day. I have one of the Wal-Mart debit cards that I primarily use for on-line transactions since I don't really want to use one of my other cards for this purpose. Doing it this way costs a bit more, but my comfort level is much higher especially since I have been the victim of identity theft once before. I'm sure that Wal-Mart has a record of every transaction I've made with this card!
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