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Monday, March 03, 2008

Military Contractor Aims To Buy Voting Company Diebold

[via DemocracyNow!]
[O]ne of the country’s largest military contractors, United Technologies Corporation, is attempting to buy the electronic voting machine company Diebold. United Technologies has made an unsolicited two point six billion dollar bid to buy Diebold.

Needless to say, this bears close watching. It should go without saying that contracting out our elections to for-profit companies is the most idiotically facile libertopian idea imaginable, while there are few things more horrifying than the swelling ranks of unaccountable private mercenary armies (some headed by Christianist fundamentalists, others by neoliberal market fundamentalists, all of them up to no good), clumsily and expensively and often criminally implementing US policies both foreign and domestic. But the notion of private mercenary armies owning secretive proprietary software controlling our elections conjures up images out of some straight-up dystopian corporate fascist cyberpunk nightmare.

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