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Voting machine manufacturer

Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (DESI), was a subsidiary of Diebold that made and sold voting machines. In 2009, it was sold to competitor ES&S. In 2010, Dominion Voting Systems purchased the primary assets of Premier, including all intellectual property, software, firmware and hardware for Premier's current and legacy optical scan, central scan, and touch screen voting systems, and all versions of the GEMS election management system from ES&S. At the time ES&S spun off the company due to monopoly charges its systems were in use in 1,400 jurisdictions in 33 states and serving nearly 28 million people.

DESI was run by Bob Urosevich, starting in 1976. In 1979, Bob Urosevich founded, and served as the president (through 1992) of, American Information Systems, now known as Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), becoming a chief competitor to DESI. Todd Urosevich, Bob's brother, was vice president, aftermarket sales, of Election Systems & Software, Inc. In 1995, Bob Urosevich started I Mark Systems, whose product was a touch screen voting system utilizing a smart card and biometric encryption authorization technology. Global Election Systems, Inc. (GES) acquired I Mark in 1997, and on 31 July 2000, Bob Urosevich was promoted from Vice President of Sales and Marketing and New Business Development, to president and chief operating officer. On January 22, 2002, Diebold announced the acquisition of GES, then a manufacturer and supplier of electronic voting terminals and solutions. The total purchase price, in stock and cash, was $24.7 million. Global Election Systems subsequently changed its name to Diebold Election Systems, Inc.

In late 2006, Diebold decided to remove its name from the front of the voting machines in what its spokesperson called "a strategic decision on the part of the corporation". In August 2007 Diebold Election Systems changed its name to "Premier Election Solutions" ("PES").

Following the acquisition, the Department of Justice and 14 individual states launched investigations into the transaction on antitrust grounds. In March 2010, the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against ES&S, requiring it to divest voting equipment systems assets it acquired from Premier Election Solutions in order to restore competition. The company sold the assets to Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion Voting Systems acquired Premier on May 19, 2010. "We are extremely pleased to conclude this transaction, which will restore much needed competition to the American voting systems market and will allow Dominion to expand its capabilities and operational footprint to every corner of the United States," said John Poulos, CEO of Dominion. The transaction was approved by the Department of Justice and nine state attorneys general.

In August 2003, Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fundraiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get out the funds letter to Ohio Republicans. In the letters he said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Although he clarified his statement as merely a poor choice of words, critics of Diebold and/or the Republican party interpreted this as at minimum an indication of a conflict of interest, at worst implying a risk to the fair counting of ballots. He responded to the critics by pointing out that the company's election machines division is run out of Texas by a registered Democrat. Nonetheless, O'Dell vowed to lower his political profile lest his personal actions harm the company. O'Dell resigned his post of chairman and chief executive of Diebold on December 12, 2005, following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading.

In 2004, after an initial investigation into the company's practices, Secretary of State of California Kevin Shelley issued a ban on one model of Diebold voting machines in that state. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, joined the state of California into a false claims suit filed in November 2003 by Bev Harris and Alameda County citizen Jim March. The suit charged that Diebold had given false information about the security and reliability of Diebold Election Systems machines that were sold to the state. To settle the case, Diebold agreed to pay $2.6 million and to implement certain reforms. On August 3, 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified Diebold and three other electronic voting systems after a "top to bottom review of the voting machines certified for use in California in March 2007." In April 2007, the Maryland General Assembly voted to replace paperless touchscreen voting machines with paper ballots counted by optical scanners, effective in time for the 2010 general (November) elections. The law, signed by the Governor in May 2007, was made contingent on the provision of funding by no later than April 2008. The Governor included such funding in his proposed budget in January 2008, but the funding was defeated by the state House in July 2008. In March 2009, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified Diebold's GEMS version 1.18.19 after the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project discovered that GEMS had silently dropped 197 ballots from its tabulation of a single precinct in Eureka, California. The discovery was made after project members conducted an independent count using the ballot counting program Ballot Browser.

In September 2003, a large number of internal Diebold memos, dating back to 1999, were posted to the BlackBoxVoting. org web site, resulting in the site being shut down due to a Diebold cease and desist order. Later, other website organizations Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, a group of student activists at Swarthmore College posted the memos. U. S. Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, placed portions of the files on his websites. Diebold attempted to stop the publication of these internal memos by sending cease and desist letters to each site hosting these documents, demanding that they be removed. Diebold claimed the memos as their copyrighted material, and asserted that anyone who published the memos online was in violation of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act found in §512 of the United States Copyright Act. When it turned out that some of the challenged groups would not back down, Diebold retracted their threat. Those who had been threatened by Diebold then sued for court costs and damages, in OPG v. Diebold. This suit eventually led to a victory for the plaintiffs against Diebold, when in October 2004 Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that Diebold abused its copyrights in its efforts to suppress the embarrassing memos.

In January and February 2004, a whistleblower named Stephen Heller brought to light memos from Jones Day, Diebold's attorneys, informing Diebold that they were in breach of California law by continuing to use illegal and uncertified software in California voting machines. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed civil and criminal suits against the company, which were dropped when Diebold settled out of court for $2.6 million. In February 2006, Heller was charged with three felonies for this action. On November 20, 2006, Heller made a plea agreement to pay $10,000 to Jones Day, write an apology, and receive three years probation.

Ohio State Senator Jeff Jacobson, Republican, asked Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, in July 2003 to disqualify Diebold's bid to supply voting machines for the state, after security problems were discovered in its software, but was refused. Blackwell had ordered Diebold touch screen voting machines, reversing an earlier decision by the state to purchase only optical scan voting machines which, unlike the touch screen devices, would leave a "paper trail" for recount purposes. Blackwell was found, in April 2006, to own 83 shares of Diebold stock, down from 178 shares purchased in January 2005, which he attributed to an unidentified financial manager at Credit Suisse First Boston who had violated his instructions to avoid potential conflict of interest, without his knowledge. When Cuyahoga county's primary was held on May 2, 2006, officials ordered the hand counting of more than 18,000 paper ballots after Diebold's new optical scan machines produced inconsistent tabulations, leaving several local races in limbo for days and eventually resulting in a reversal of the outcome of one race for state representative. Blackwell ordered an investigation by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections; Ohio Democrats demanded that Blackwell, who was also the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2006, recuse himself from the investigation due to conflicts of interest, but Blackwell did not do so. The Republican head of the Franklin County, Ohio Board of Elections, Matt Damschroder, said a Diebold contractor came to him and bragged of a $50,000 check he had written to Blackwell's "political interests."