Diebold - ES&S Merger poses national security threat

SOURCE: BlackBoxVoting.ORG

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Click to view data in spreadsheet format.

Corporate control of America's vote counts before the merger:

Consolidated corporate control of America's vote counts post-merger:

BlackBoxVoting provides the data and summary of data relating to the potential monopoly corporate control of America's elections should the merger of e-voting companies ES&S and Diebold be allowed to go through.

DATA SUMMARIES

BY PURCHASING JURISDICTION:

• ES&S 47.8% Diebold/Premier 27.1% .......AFTER ACQUISITION 74.8%
• Sequoia 9.3%
• Hart 10.5%
• Danaher & Shoup: 0.4%
• Microvote: 3.0%
• Winvote: 1.1%
• Unilect: 0.7%
• Populex: 0.1%
• VTI: 0.2%

BY VOTES COUNTED:

• ES&S: 40.0% + Diebold: 27.9% AFTER ACQUISITION 67.9%
• Sequoia: 17.0%
• Hart: 9.2%
• Danaher/Shoup: 1.7%
• Microvote: 1.9%
• Winvote: 1.0%
• Unilect: 0.2%
• Populex: 0.1%
• VTI: 0.1%

Methodology:

Purchasing jurisdictions are put into the common denominator of "counties". Wisconsin, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire have their municipalities with autonomous purchasing capability (to some extent; the states add restriction to competition by authorizing only certain voting systems). These municipalities are broken out in sheets within the spreadsheet, but for purposes of weighting market dominence, are given fractional value in counties.

If this wasn't done, the US would show about 3100 county jurisdictions, but Wisconsin alone would show 1900 municipality jurisdictions giving it an absurd weighting overall.

Example of how the purchasing jurisdictions are weighted in Wisconsin: If a county has 50 municipalities, half with Sequoia and half with ES&S, it would be counted as .5 Sequoia, .5 ES&S.

Hand Count and lever locations are a potential market for the computerized voting industry, but not an actualized market, and therefore are omitted. Rationale: When computing market share, for purposes of dominance, for Macs vs. PC computers, you would calculate, of all the computers purchased, how many are Macs and how many are PCs. You wouldn't include the households with no computer.

New York, with the exception of a very few counties, has not purchased voting systems and is still on lever machines. Only the voting machines already purchased are reflected in market share.

Note that the proportionality and common denominator for actual votes counted by vendor gets a little difficult; I do not have the figures for registered voters in each municipality, and used estimates.

The original figures for systems used is drawn from state documents, secretary of state Web sites, with a few states from VerifiedVoting.org.

The figures for voter registration are from the EAC survey, using the 2006 stats. A few locations (New Hampshire) did not provide stats, and I therefore estimated the voter registrations based on 80% of population. A couple other locations (New York, a handful of California counties) did not have voter reg stats in the EAC document but did have 2006 stats on their secretary of stat Web site.

Permission to distribute this spreadsheet is granted with credit to Black Box Voting.

Bev Harris Founder - Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org

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