This past September, Diebold high-tailed it out of the e-voting business by selling its entire e-voting unit to competitor ES&S. The sale was supposed to correct the company's enormous mistake of jumping into the elections business in the first place, a move that irreparably damaged the venerable safe and ATM vendor's once bulletproof reputation. But at the behest of voting rights groups, which objected strenuously to the sale on the grounds that it would only strengthen ES&S's e-voting monopoly, the FTC has launched a formal investigation of the $5 million deal.

We first got wind of the investigation in an e-mail blast from BlackBoxVoting.org, the group that had filed a formal, 21-page complaint about the sale back in September. The complaint alleges that the deal will hand ES&S a 74 percent share of the US electronic voting machine market, and will result in higher voting system prices and a lack of innovation. BBV also notes that 14 individual states are also launching antitrust investigations into the Diebold/ES&S deal, and for some of the states this investigation is in addition to the actions they're already taking against vendors for selling them faulty election equipment.

Given what a disaster e-voting has been for states and municipalities, and given how many of these entities are strapped for cash and are hoping to get their money back from e-voting vendors, it's no wonder that the market is consolidating. No one in his or her right mind would want to be in the e-voting business after what has happened the past few years. Designing and implementing a secure, fair, audit-friendly election system is such a technical, educational, and political challenge that all of the big boys in the tech space—IBM, Microsoft, HP, etc.—smartly steered clear of it when the Help America Vote Act of 2002 promised big federal dollars for any vendor that could deliver systems by the 2004 elections. Only ill-equipped first-timers with little in the way of relevant expertise took the bait, and the result was (predictably) a huge mess.

At this point, no one has the stomach for the e-voting market, which is why it's shrinking and consolidating. It could be that we end up with ES&S as the last lawsuit target standing.