13. Voting Machines

Diebold, an Ohio company which had Bush fundraiser Wally O'Dell at the helm in 2004, just sold its voting machine business to Electronic Systems & Software. That company now controls 70% of all voting machines in the country. When a recent audit of its touchscreens failed, it declined to conduct an independent audit to verify the integrity of its systems. (ES&S has not responded to requests for comment.) Theoretically (as software makers have testified in Congress), electronic voting systems are extremely easy to rig, so putting 70% on the vote in one company's hand is extremely iffy. In 2000 and 2004, exit polling data vastly contradicted the reported poll numbers in swing states, Florida and Ohio, data that had been to be accurate to 1% in prior contests.