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Entering the political sphere

Around the same time, the Brazilian government was looking to fully automate its election system. Procomp got the $106 million contract - Diebold's largest ever - to make 186,000 identical electronic voting machines for the 2000 election.

At the exact same time that Florida's officials were haggling over butterfly ballots, Brazil's were congratulating themselves on a clean and tidy result.

Emboldened by Diebold's success in Brazil, CEO Walden O'Dell set out to ensure that the company got a serious piece of the U.S. elections business.

The first problem was that the Brazilian machines weren't sophisticated enough for the U.S. market and couldn't be certified quickly. So O'Dell needed to buy a company to get into the market for the 2002 midterm elections.

In June 2001, Diebold announced it was acquiring Global Electronic Systems, based in McKinney, Texas, for about $30 million. Global was a $7 million operation that made most of its money printing ballots for its optical-scan reading machine. Its touch-screen system, the Accu-Vote-TS, wasn't a big seller.

Nothing was a big seller then. The elections business was populated by a couple dozen private firms that often literally sold equipment out of the back of their cars. That's because their customers were poor.

U.S. elections are intensely local affairs, run by more than 3,000 separate counties. Buying new equipment was a luxury. If county commissioners had to choose between filling a pothole or buying new voting equipment, the pothole invariably won.