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Reuters is reporting that Diebold, the notorious and partisan maker of electronic voting machines, now faces an informal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry about how the company reports its revenue. As the saying goes in the voting machine business, there’s not much profit in selling machines, but there’s a lot in selling election results. Maybe that’s why Venezuela recently got into the voting machine business. They recently bought Sequoia, a major e-voting machine company used in the United States.

Critics have long charged that the Diebold machines are easily susceptible to manipulation, a fact confirmed by the General Accountability Office (GAO) regarding e-voting machines in general. News reports show election officials with Diebold machines across the nation are close to hitting the panic button. They already have in Pennsylvania, where
on Friday, May 5, 2006, elections officials impounded all of their Diebold touchscreen electronic vote machines “after a major firmware flaw was revealed which constitues a ‘major national security risk.'” Hacking into and disturbing election results fits nicely into what the Pentagon warned about in its briefing paper “Info Wars.”

And Diebold has had more than its share of malfunctions and problems. Utah officials are worried about their Diebold opti-scan machines – the same ones used in Cleveland and the same technology used in Toledo that malfunctioned so famously in the 2004 election. The covers of the November 2004 issues of both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics warned of the dangers of e-voting machines. The recent Cuyahoga County fiasco is just another dead canary in the cage. At a certain point we’ll realize they’re not dying of natural causes. We’ll find out that there is a deadly poison in our democratic system.