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Diebold Voting Machine, now known as Premier Election Solutions, is a subsidiary of Diebold that manufactures and sells voting systems. Its machines are responsible for tabulating over 75% of votes in the US. The software has been criticized for security vulnerabilities and unreliable tabbing statistics. Diebold began as a manufacturer of bank vaults and later moved into ATMs and automated voting systems. The company’s reach expanded to North America when the US government passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. Maryland and Georgia were the first states to place orders for the Diebold voting system, but there were complaints of problems with the touch screen software. In 2006, the Diebold name was removed from its voting systems, and the company changed its name to Premier Election Solutions.
Diebold Voting Machine is a product of Premier Election Solutions (PES), formerly known as Diebold Election Systems Inc. PES is a subsidiary of Diebold that is dedicated to manufacturing and selling voting systems. The company’s voting machines are responsible for tabulating more than three-quarters of all votes cast in the United States of America. The operating system architecture that runs on the voting system is the Diebold GEMS central tabulator. This tabbing software, which sits atop a Microsoft Access database system, has been criticized for its perceived security vulnerabilities and the unreliability of its tabbing statistics, the most notable example being the incorrect reporting of exits poll of the 2004 United States presidential election.
The Diebold brand dates back to the 19th century when the company manufactured sturdy bank vaults. So rugged, in fact, that the Diebold brand owes much of its latter-day success to the Great Chicago Fire, when 878 Diebold safes and their contents were some of the few things that survived the fire intact. Later, the company moved into manufacturing ATMs and then into automated voting systems when, in 2000, the Brazilian government ordered 186,000 machines from Diebold’s Brazilian subsidiary, Procomp. The company’s reach extended to North America when the US government passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, a US$3.9 billion (USD) initiative to replace anachronistic punch cards and mechanically used at the time by the United States.
The states of Maryland and Georgia were the first to place orders for the Diebold voting system, when in early 2002 the former purchased $13 million worth of touch screen voting devices and the latter purchased $20,000 Diebold machines. Election observers who oversaw elections in these two states the same year reported a number of problems, with the AccuVote-TS touch screen software serving as the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Diebold voting system being the subject of particular censorship. Among the complaints plaguing the system was “vote hopping,” caused by an uncalibrated touch screen system registering a vote for a different candidate than the one the voter intended to vote for.
In 2006 Diebold Voting Systems chief executive officer (CEO), Thomas Swidarski, announced that the Diebold name would be removed from its voting systems, and in 2007 the company changed its name to Premier Election Solutions.
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