According to a Dutch grassroots group called "We don't trust voting computers", the head of the voting maching consortium Nedap/Groenendaal tried to blackmail the Dutch government in order to continue to cooperate in running its elections. Like many election offices in the US, the Dutch government needed the help of the voting machine company in order to hold an election.
The company owner even tried to force the Dutch government to buy its stock in order to cooperate, as documented by both the original Dutch email and its English translation.
Check out the full article HERE and prepare to be shocked.
Follow me below the jump for the sordid details and some choice quotes.
The Freedom of Information Act--Dutch version--brought shocking correspondence to light between Jan Groenendaal's company and the Dutch government. (Nedap/Groenendaal is the Dutch consortium; its products marketed in the US as LibertyVote and LibertyControl.)
See the original article for links to all the references, but I'll quote a few interesting sections here:
The letters also show that Groenendaal was more or less blackmailing the Dutch government at the time of the previous parliamentary elections....Therefore, Groenendaal makes a very straightforward business proposal in the same e-mail, : "The ministry buys the shares of our company at a reasonable price, [...] and we will still cooperate during the next election (the Dutch 2007 provincial elections to be held March 7th).
Wow--buy shares of our company pronto, and we'll cooperate. Nice.
On November 22nd [2006] (the day of the national elections) he writes a letter (english translation) which doesn't spell blackmail as explicitly to minister Nicolaï in which he indicates his need to sell quickly because he would like to "acutely" retire. But when that letter fails to elicit a fast response, Groenendaal writes an alarming e-mail (Dutch) to the Electoral Council in which he says: "We are heading towards a very dangerous situation". Right in the heat of election preparation, he writes: "I have ordered my employees to halt all activity until we have received an answer that is acceptable to us", and asks the secretary-director of the Electoral Council to intervene on his behalf. As far as we know, the Dutch government never filed criminal charges in relation to this attempted extortion.
Jan Groenendaal also tried to convince the Dutch government that the head of the election-reform group "We don't trust voting computers" is a terrorist:
Groenendaal writes: "After all, his activities are destabilizing society and are as such comparable to terrorism. Preventive custody and a judicial investigation would have been very appropriate."
In the Netherlands they seem to have the same problems with inspection (er, lack of inspection) as we do here:
The "We do not trust voting computers" foundation has been campaigning against the use of the current generation of voting computers in The Netherlands since the summer of 2006. As a result of this campaign, it was revealed that Dutch election legislation fails to address key issues regarding voting computers and that the voting computer inspection regime is faulty at best. Inspections by an independent party (a private company named Brightsight) are limited to a very small number of machines and the inspections mostly test for resistance against vibrations, high humidity and power failures. Resistance against willful manipulation is neither part of the legal requirements nor of the actual inspections.
[emphasis mine]
Sounds just like the EAC and the ITAs, doesn't it?!
Check out the full article. These brief excerpts don't do it justice.
Could this happen here? Nah. This is the USA. . . But New York State is considering buying 28,000 of these machines. Apparently Ireland--which bought them and decided not to use them after an independent commission found lots of problems--is eager to find a buyer.