Diebold recently spun off its voting machine company and renamed it to Premier Election Solutions. That's a pretty transparent attempt to leave behind the bad associations the public has with the name Diebold. At least this is a more accepted business practice than removing critcism from your own Wikipedia entry, which Diebold also did.
It seems the parent corporation couldn't sell off the troubled election division, so they spun it off instead.
The press release says, "Premier inherits a very strong reputation for service that is unmatched in the election system industry." As we can see from the recent decertification of all electronic Diebold, uh, Premier voting machines in California, that strong reputation must be bad strong, not good strong. And clearly they are not unmatched: the other voting machine vendors all failed the California tests too.
In fact the California action might have played a role in this decision, though a Diebold spokesperson played that role down in a recent PCWorld article:
The moves in California played a small part in the decision to restructure the business unit and lower revenue expectations, Jacobsen said. "This is a cumulative effect," he added. "There's a lot of activity in a lot of states."
Or maybe the thrill was just gone for Diebold after losing ex-CEO Wally O'Dell. Without him how can they possibly deliver those Ohio votes for Bush again in 2008?
