Diebold's Letter to Rolling Stone and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Response

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds:

The inaccurate and misleading statements in Diebold's response begin with the very first sentence. Not only did I make every effort to verify the accuracy of my sources, I made sure that researchers from both Rolling Stone and my own office contacted Diebold for comment. As readers of the article can confirm for themselves, several responses from the company are included in the piece.

Diebold then attempts to smear Chris Hood, the whistleblower who witnessed first-hand the company's practices during the 2002 election. Citing a letter from the Georgia Secretary of State's office, Diebold claims it "removed Mr. Hood from his responsibilities within the state" in July because of "poor performance." The letter, however, did not prevent Diebold from sending Hood to Maryland, where it relied extensively on him to help roll out its machines for the election that fall. Nor did it prevent Diebold from awarding Hood a contract to continue his work for the company through the 2004 election -- more than two years after his supposedly "poor performance" in Georgia.

As I reported, the company failed to receive proper certification from the state for the "patch" it made to its voting machines. But Diebold is correct in noting that Hood was not present in Georgia in August 2002, as stated in my article. Hood was mistaken in recalling the exact date that he was ordered by Diebold president Bob Urosevich to make an unauthorized patch: The alterations he made actually began several weeks earlier, in July of that year, during a time in which Diebold concedes that Hood was still working for the company in Georgia. I regret the error, and the online version of my article has been revised to reflect the correction.

Diebold is also correct on one other point: Its machines were used to count the votes in nearly half of Ohio's counties in 2005 -- not, as stated in the article, in 2004. Again, I regret the error and have revised the online version accordingly.

On every other point in its response, however, Diebold is misleading or flat-out wrong. In its most ridiculous sleight of hand, the company asserts that none of the three counties in Florida with the most discrepancies during the 2004 election used Diebold machines. That is absolutely correct. What the company neglects to mention is that my article never suggests that they did. I note only that all three counties used electronic voting machines -- which experts from the University of California concluded may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 of the state's votes to Bush.

Diebold offers similar non-denials regarding its generous campaign contributions to Republicans, its failure to follow-up on most of the recommendations in the RABA report, and the fact that it got into the election business only a few months before it began rolling out voting machines in Georgia. It calls the Princeton study and the Cuyahoga County report "deeply flawed" and "proven to be in error," even though its criticisms of them have failed to undercut their alarming conclusions. And it dismisses September's primary disaster in Maryland as "human error" -- despite the fact that the catastrophe was created, in no small part, by its own failure to properly test its software and to provide it to the state in time to train poll-workers.

In one of its few direct denials, Diebold insists that all of the software it deployed during the 2004 presidential primaries was fully certified. Yet officials in California banned Diebold machines from four counties that year after the company failed to properly secure and certify its equipment. Diebold not only agreed to pay the state $2.6 million for making false statements about its certification, but Urosevich himself conceded at a public hearing that the company's actions resulted in the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters.

Indeed, what is most striking about the company's response to my article is what it fails to deny. As I documented in my article, hackers can easily rig electronic voting machines to fix an election -- and can design their tampering to go undetected. This represents a grave threat to the integrity of our elections. If Diebold were really committed to the "bright light of truth," as it insists, it would move immediately to equip all of its machines with paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted by officials in the event of vote rigging or equipment malfunction. Without such transparency, our votes remain in the hands of Diebold and other private companies -- and our democracy remains at risk.