Don't win a big contract? SUE!

[acroyear]

Grokked from /. Emphasis mine.

Voting device pact at issue - The Boston Globe:

Diebold Election Systems Inc. , one of the country's largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK , a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.

The contract is valued at about $9 million.

William M. Weisberg , a lawyer representing Diebold, said in an interview yesterday that the company wants a review of the internal records showing how Galvin's office came to select AutoMARK earlier this year.

"We compete against AutoMARK around the country all the time," Weisberg said. "Based on the criteria set out by the Commonwealth, we had a fair degree of confidence we'd come out on top, and nothing we heard during the process dissuaded us of that confidence."

Weisberg said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes "it's worth the time and money" of going to court to challenge the contract's award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

Galvin yesterday called the Diebold suit "frivolous" and unlikely to succeed. "My office made a very reasonable selection after a long, open process of evaluating the voting machines," Galvin said.

"We are entirely confident we will prevail," he said.

In court filings, Diebold has indicated it will ask a judge today to immediately halt further use or distribution of the AutoMARK machines to municipalities throughout the state. If a judge issues that order, Diehold will then present arguments over the coming weeks on why the process was flawed, Weisberg said.

"We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition," he said.

This ain't the Onion.  Diebold really is being THAT stupid.

Besides, if they had just filed a FOI act request, they could have gotten the same information with far less money and attention...

...oh yeah, Diebold and their Republican overlords want to do away with the FOIA, don't they?

Comments

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

So in other words, this fishing expedition could mean they lose a couple of fish in the process...

Hm... This could get interesting.

However, I would think that discovery is usually only on or around those things that are being prosecuted? How much leeway would a defense lawyer have to argue that he has to dig back at the prosecuting one?

Sorry, my legal experience comes from Law and Order, not one of the best sources around. ;)

[mandrakan.livejournal.com]

The relevant phrase is "reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence."

Basically, if Diebold is arguing that their proposal should have won, anything relevant to their proposal is fair game for discovery. They can try to block it on relevance grounds, but that's hard to maintain under the best of circumstances, and especially when their own lawsuit is such a fishing expedition.