Reply #4: IBM considered the business too dirty to mess with --- [View All]

[defendandprotect]

But after several years, IBM realized that the Vote-amatic voting machine, the patents on which IBM had bought from its inventor, T. K. Harris, was actually a Pandora's box. IBM, following several disturbing public relations problems brought about by both incompetent and malicious "mishaps" during elections, took its name off the product. IBM eventually sold its rights in the company after IBM's president, Thomas Watson, read an article that implied he might be trying to install IBM voting machines in enough precincts to win him the first electronically rigged election for President of the United States. Watson had no ambitions to become a U.S. president and was mortified that his computers would be implicated in antidemocratic functions.

With the crusty, impeccable IBM out of the business, the scramble to produce new, improved, less scrupulous voting hardware and software began in earnest. Entrepreneurs made fortunes peddling the early computerized counters to towns and cities across America. They sold the machines as the "patriotic," "progressive" thing to do for American voters.

Newspaper and broadcast media seldom bothered to look into the voting machine industry and, in fact, took advantage of the speed the new machines offered in counting. The press did not investigate the accuracy, or lack of it, of the final tallies.


http://www.constitution.org/vote/votescam01.htm