Sometimes it's just an offhanded comment that contains the seed of a great idea. Like
this one, where the writer joked that problems with voting wouldn't go as unnoticed if George Soros owned Diebold. It got me thinking. Why
should't George Soros own Diebold?
I'm not an anti-trust attorney, so there may be some obvious problems with my idea, but in rough form, here it is: George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, John Sperling and the rest of the mega-wealthy people who care about this country and are willing to use their money to make a difference, should make hostile takeover attempts of any publicly-owned manufacturer of voting and tabulating systems. Try to buy out the owners of the privately held companies like Diebold by offering them obscene amounts of money. If that doesn't work, drive them out of the voting equipment sector or completely out of business. Use the companies purchased or new companies formed with large amounts of capital to drive down the price of the equipment, and after they achieve market dominance, put the companies in a public trust.
Sure, there have to be some practical problems. But the lack of competition in an industry that sells exclusively to the public sector isn't without precedent. Nobody with any knowledge of Department of Defense procurement policy can tell us that we have competition in the high-tech weapons industry. And if there were a vibrant market for government-purchased goods, we would have all the flu shots we could want. So I doubt the idea can be easily dismissed without some explanation of how a monopoly in the voting machine industry would be illegal but the monopolies of weapons and vaccination producers is not.
So, Mr. Soros and others with wealth in the billions, how about buying those voting machine companies?