Sarasota Selling Defective Voting Machines

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Sarasota Selling Defective Voting Machines

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

Feb 02 2007--Venice,FL

by Daniel Hopsicker

Even as the New York Times reported that attention to November's

disputed Congressional election in Sarasota has faded, Sarasota

Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent announced her intention this week

to begin selling -presumably "as is"- hundreds of Sarasota's

touch-screen voting machines proven defective by the November

election, where they malfunctioned so badly that frustrated poll

workers actually resorted to advising voters who were unable to get

their votes to register to try using their knuckles.

Dent has resolutely denied that anything was wrong with the voting

machines, despite a Sarasota Herald Tribune poll which reported that

the overwhelming majority of precinct officials interviewed cited

difficulty getting the electronic touch screens to register their

votes as the biggest complaint.

Even though she is eminently responsible for disenfranchising as many

as 18,000 voters from having their votes counted in the most

hotly-contested Congressional race in the country, Dent appears

defiant, and unabashed.

One reason for this intransigence has now become clear: There's a big

payday involved.

"Troubled, maybe. But all they need is a good home."

Not for her (not, at least, yet), nor the long-suffering taxpayers of

Sarasota County footing the whopping $4.6 million bill for the

soon-to-be-junked touch screen voting machines from industry giant

Election Services and Software.

The payday will enrich only voting machine vendors, who will be only

too happy to take the defective machines off the county's hands for

pennies on the dollar; then turn around and resell them to unwitting

election officials in unsuspecting counties in another part of the

country, whose voters will remain clueless about the machines

"troubled" history until after the check's have been cashed.

No surprise there. Election machine companies comprise the

constituency which Dent has vociferously championed and defended

against all comers, even at the expense of the people she was elected

to serve.

Re-cycling bad product to new patsies is a familiar scenario in the

election industry, and a sign of a return to "business as usual" for

an industry which counts on the fact that Americans have short

memories.

But it does appear to be the first time an election supervisor paid to

represent voters and taxpayers has instead protected from criticism

and scrutiny an election machine company responsible for selling the

electoral equivalent of thousands of automotive "lemons."

"La plus ca change." Take a look at a couple of headlines from the Los

Angeles Times:

"COMPUTERIZED VOTE TALLIES HAVE TOO MANY GLITCHES, EXPERTS CHARGE,"

reads one.

"ELECTRONIC ELECTIONS SEEN AS AN INVITATION TO FRAUD," reports the

second.

These may sound like headlines ripped right out of yesterday's

newspaper.But the date on one is July 4, 1989; the other is from

December 3 of that same year.

In the ensuing 18 years, it is fair to say, nothing much has changed.

So the real question is: How do the companies and individuals involved

in this conspiracy keep getting away with it?

One answer, of course, is that representatives of voting machine

companies, including some who have been previously convicted of

bribing public officials, not considered much of a "blemish" in the

industry, are notorious for spreading the wealth around.

These are people who can be counted on to remember with fondness Kathy

Dent's refusal to point a finger of blame at anyone besides the voters

in her district.

Who loves ya, baby?

After Dent is either voted out of office, or, in a more likely

scenario, resigns to "spend more time with her family," they will be

there with offers of assistance and employment.

It's a well-trodden path, with election companies making defense

contractors look like Boy Scouts in contracting the labor of people

who only recently were charged with regulating their new employers.

In Florida, the past two Secretaries of State, responsible for

state-wide elections, for example, both "cashed-in" after leaving

public office by taking lucrative "lobbying" jobs with election

machine companies.

And then of course there is former Florida Secretary of State

Katherine Harris, whose payback for choosing sides in the 2000

Presidential vote snafu in Florida included a Congressional seat of

her very own, and, so she thought, a good shot at becoming a U.S.

Senator.

Who you calling a "dummy front company?"

The upcoming Sarasota sale is not the first time a key player in the

saga of Sarasota's touch screen voting machines has been involved in a

scenario in which a major investment in voting machines was written

off by frustrated election officials.

One of the key individuals at the heart of the Sarasota election

story, Gary Greenhalgh, was involved in such a situation ten years ago

in Pennsylvania. Voting machines he sold there were adjudged by

election officials and a U.S. District Court to be, alas, defective.

Greenhalgh, a vice president of Election Services & Software, the

largest election services company in the country, was responsible for

the sale and installation of the electronic touch screen machines in

Sarasota County, and perhaps instrumental in much of the rest of

Florida as well.

Moreover, he has been intimately involved in setting policies and

practices in the American election biz since the days of Gerald Ford,

when he worked for the Federal Election Commission. Greenhalgh's

well-chronicled career offers a window on long-standing industry

practices.

(Would it weren't so! Greenhalgh, you'll recall, is threatening to sue

us for slander and libel in Federal Court in Washington D.C. for the

way he's been portrayed in these pages during the past several

months.)

"The never ending story is a never ending story."

The story begins in Montgomery County, in suburban Philadelphia. At

the time, Gary Greenhalgh was the vice president for sales for

MicroVote, an Indiana-based election machine company.

From a report about the electronic voting machine deal between

Greenhalgh's MicroVote and suburban Montgomery County in the

Philadelphia Inquirer on AUGUST 5, 1996:

"It should have been a heady moment, as Montgomery County's election

staff met in the Norristown courthouse two years ago to bring voting

into the computer age. With overwhelming voter support, the county had

chucked its clunky, 50-year-old lever voting machines for compact

electronic models from Indiana-based MicroVote Inc."

It was "a venture that began with high hopes, but would end in a

fiasco less than two years later," the paper reported.

What went wrong? According to the Inquirer, just about everything.

"The lightweight MicroVote machines were expected to produce quicker

results and be easier to maintain than the lever machines. But, county

officials say, too many MicroVote units lost power, jammed or

otherwise malfunctioned in the last two elections. This resulted in

long lines, in voters leaving polling stations before they voted, and

in lost votes."

"He's in recovery with that Republican Congressional molester, what's-

his-name."

A headline in the Nov 12, 1995, Allentown Morning Call summed up the

result:

"HIGH-TECH VOTING FLOPS IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY"

"Two years ago, Montgomery County commissioners spent $ 4 million to

buy a high-tech electronic system that was supposed to make voting

easy and tabulation quick. But if the cumbersome, confusing events

surrounding Tuesday's general election were any indication, the

commissioners might consider going back to paper ballots and an abacus

for next year's presidential contest.

`It was a catastrophe,' said Commissioner Joseph Hoeffel, a Democrat."

As recriminations began, it occurred to public officials that the

Election Commissioner responsible for the big purchase was, alas, an

alcoholic.

In mid-1994, Montgomery County Chief Clerk Nicholas Melair said he

began receiving anonymous letters alleging that McAdoo had a drinking

problem.

"A drinking problem can actually work to your advantage"

"You hear through the grapevine, 'Gary got Mike drunk and that's how

the machine was purchased,' " said Greenhalgh, who said he spent time

with McAdoo in restaurants where "we certainly had a couple drinks

together."

"But I must have kept Mike drunk for a year and a half because that's

how long this process took," Greenhalgh said.

McAdoo said his drinking didn't become a problem until fall 1994, at

the end of his county career, and did not affect his judgment on

MicroVote. He described the county election job as extremely

stressful.

"I'd still be drinking if I was there," said McAdoo, who is now a

produce manager for a suburban supermarket.

"I have never run into a staff that's as uncooperative and just

outright nasty as those people," Greenhalgh said about Election Board

employees in an interview.

"Sue me sue you" blues redux

The glitches in the voting machine persisted through several election

cycles. Eventually Montgomery County sued MicroVote, Microvote sued

Montgomery County, and everybody went to court to sort things out.

The County's attorneys summarized what happened in a press release

later:

"Microvote Corp. sold an electronic voting system to Montgomery

County. The County contended that the voting system malfunctioned

after the voting machines shut down randomly and unpredictably as a

result of their microcomputer chips sensing internal power surges

emitted by the motors that scrolled the ballot pages."

"This resulted in long lines, in voters leaving polling stations

before they voted, and in lost votes. In addition, after the polls

closed, the software malfunctioned when counting the votes, causing

Microvote employees to report the wrong results to the media."

"The jury returned a verdict against Microvote and Westchester for in

excess of $1,048,500. Microvote and Westchester appealed. The Third

Circuit affirmed the jury verdict and the judgment of the District

Court on all issues. The dismissal of all claims against the County

and its subsequent settlement, jury verdict and judgment, won by EG&S,

represent a swing of in excess of $3.4 million for the County."

Reported the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"In June (of 1996) county commissioners dumped the MicroVote machines

for a loss of $4 million and agreed to spend $4 million more to buy a

new computerized system just in time for the November presidential

election."

"What we got here is...failure to communicate!"

And this is when the story takes a big turn for the worse.

Montgomery County traded their defective machines, which had

malfunctioned in three straight elections, to a company which turned

around and resold them.

The eventual result was that following a series of transactions a

hapless Election Supervisor named Bill Culp in North Carolina's

Mecklenburg County ended up buying more than 400 of Montgomery

County's rejects.

Culp didn't know it yet, but he was already half-way towards assuming

a position on the chain gang for taking bribes. A story in the Dec 11,

2000 L.A. Times reported:

"While Bill Culp Jr. was election director of Mecklenburg County in

North Carolina, voting machine salesmen were eager to treat him to a

very good time.

"One salesman paid for two days at the historic La Fonda Hotel on the

main plaza in Santa Fe, N.M. A company manager took Culp and about 20

other county commissioners and election officials to dinner and

dancing at an expensive Houston steakhouse.

"The president of an Indianapolis voting-supply firm invited him to a

Pacers basketball game when the home team faced off against Culp's

beloved Charlotte Hornets. Culp and his host sat court-side in the

owner's box.

"Without binding regulations and with little oversight, these

relationships breed disregard for protecting ballots, obtaining the

best equipment and safeguarding public funds. At worst, close ties

erode integrity.

"Culp knows it. He left a Maryland prison in September and lives in a

Charlotte, N.C., halfway house, where he is ending a 30-month sentence

for accepting 122 bribes and kickbacks worth more than $134,000 from

January 1990 to March 1998."

"The Mecklenburg Corruption" by Robert Ludlum

The "Mecklenburg Corruption" is a likely preview of what's in the

future for Sarasota's "malfunctional" touch screen voting machines.

From the same article in the LA Times...

"Voting machines he (Culp) bought from the salesman who paid him off

had enough problems that he wrote four letters of complaint even as he

was taking the bribes.

"Publicly enthusiastic, Culp privately complained about the same

defects that led to the chaos in Pennsylvania. "The obvious weakness

in the scrolling mechanism concerns us," he wrote to the company on

May 13, 1996."

Imagine how bad things have to be before you begin writing nasty

letters to people paying you bribes.

The L.A. Times story briefly recounts the similar conviction of Jerry

Fowler, the Commissioner for Elections for the state of Louisiana.

Fowler took bribes for an entire decade before being caught. The story

makes a point worth repeating:

"In neither the Culp nor the Fowler case was a voting machine

executive accused of wrongdoing."

One step ahead of the law's a good place to be

This is exactly the point we'd be making, only... only we don't have

lawyers on staff the way the LA TIMES does.

The only people who went to jail for "The Mecklenburg Corruption" were

Bill Culp and Ed O'Day, a so-called "independent salesman." Ed's

"independence" conveniently kept MicroVote officials at one remove

from the sordid goings-on.

Even though he was the national sales director for MicroVote, Gary

Greenhalgh, we must hasten to inform, was never charged or convicted

of any crime in the case.

In fact, he showed himself to be remarkably nimble during the course

of the proceedings. On the day before the FBI subpoenaed records of

transactions between the county and MicroVote, Greenhalgh went public

about Culp's culpability( "The Culp Culpability"), emphasizing he was

acting more in sorrow than in anger:

Greenhalgh said his attorney sought to question Culp and O'Day because

MicroVote had accused him of falsifying expenses. He said Culp and

O'Day had dined with him at MicroVote's expense and therefore could

verify his expense reports. Greenhalgh said he would be surprised and

sad if an investigation found Culp guilty of any wrongdoing.

But he said he recently learned about Mecklenburg County's policy that

bars employees from taking anything of value from current or

prospective vendors.

Lavish: Very generous; Characterized by extravagance.

In an earlier story, we'd made the point that Greenhalgh had

personally "lavished" dinners and entertainment on Election Supervisor

Bill Culp.

In his letter threatening to sue, this was, alas, a sticking point for

Greenhalgh. After berating us for neglecting to mention that he was

Assistant Staff Director at the Federal Election Commission for 13

years, has a PhD., and founded the Election Center, Greenhalgh wrote:

"Also, I'd like a copy of . my announcement that I had personally

"lavished" dinners and entertainment on Bill Culp in Philadelphia and

Atlantic City."

We didn't quite get the point. It wasn't like we'd accused him of

feeding booze to an alcoholic, the earlier (and no doubt unfounded)

charge in Pennsylvania.

"What do you mean, Eartha Kitt tickets don't count?"

But that's neither here nor there. Mr. Greenhalgh's admission that he

had personally lavished dinners and entertainment on Bill Culp is

contained in a story on March 12, 1998 headlined FBI SEEKS ELECTION

BOARD RECORDS" in the Charlotte Observer:

Greenhalgh, former sales director of MicroVote Corp. of Indianapolis,

said he sometimes picked up the check for Culp and his wife, Deena,

during and after the time MicroVote was trying to win the contract for

county voting machines.

At an annual elections officials' conference in Philadelphia last May,

for instance, Greenhalgh said, he paid for the Culps to eat at a

well-known seafood restaurant. He said he also paid for a happy hour

at the popular Martini Bar on Market Street and for a lunch at the

Marriott hotel downtown, both of which Culp attended.

"When he went out with us, that dinner was paid for out of MicroVote,"

Greenhalgh said. Greenhalgh said he often took Culp and his wife,

Deena, out for meals and entertainment while seeking the county's

business.

He also said he took the Culps to dinner in Washington and afterwards

to an Eartha Kitt performance at a Georgetown night club. "I bought a

lot of meals for Bill..."

Happy Hour at The Martini Bar? Count us in!

Dinner in Philadelphia at a popular seafood restaurant (Bookbinders?),

Happy Hour at the Martini Bar, and Eartha Kitt in Georgetown may not

rise to the level of "lavish" entertaining on Greenhalgh's scale;

we're confident a jury in a Federal libel trial in Washington D.C.

will not find the description too, you know, lavish.

We also have to admit to being utterly fascinated by the "independent"

status of Ed O'Day, who the Charlotte Observer described as "a

Columbia-based agent of MicroVote."

"O'Day is president of United American Supply Co., a company that had

sold elections-related software to Mecklenburg. Because Greenhalgh

believed O'Day had a friendly relationship with Culp, and because

winning an equipment contract with North Carolina's most populous

county would be "a huge plum," Greenhalgh said he wooed O'Day to work

as an agent for MicroVote in 1992 or 1993," reported the Observer.

Perhaps this is what led the LA TIMES to wonder aloud about whether Ed

O'Day's "independent contractor" status might have been a fig leaf

covering MicroVote's private parts...

"In neither the Culp nor the Fowler case was a voting machine

executive accused of wrongdoing."

"Indy-con" Ed O'Day, by the way, hasn't let his felony conviction

stand in the way of further advancement.

He's hard at work, once again, wooing election supervisors, we

discovered in a brief blurb about a hospitality suite he had "hosted"

as a recent conference in Georgia.

Plucky fellow.

"A heart-felt paean to the home team"

Isn't America grand?

A felony conviction gets you purged from the voter rolls in Florida.

But slide across the state line to Georgia and you're welcome to be an

integral part in the casting and counting of literally millions of

votes!

And then there's Greenhalgh's long-time colleague, the late voting

systems specialist Robert Naegele, who 'way back when' designed

standards for the Federal Election Commission still in effect.

Naegele was quoted in the New York Times back in the 80's about the

relative ease with which fraud can be committed with electronic voting

machines, because of what he described as "the polynomial problem;"

i.e. the vastness of the computer spaces involved.

Naegele testified as an "expert witness" at Mr. Greenhalgh's behest in

the Montgomery County unpleasantness, but his testimony was disallowed

when it was revealed he had been relying on a "guesstimate" supplied

to him by Greenhalgh, about a feature of an election which Greenhalgh

was forced to admit he hadn't personally witnessed. A U.S. Appeals

Court did not consider this to be good form.

Do you ever get the feeling that, sometimes, you can almost feel the

vastness Naegele called the polynomial problem?

We do, too. And when we do, we realize we're a long long way from

Kansas... and even further from the lessons we once learned in Civics

Class about the workings of the greatest democracy the world has ever

known.

NEXT: MORE GARY GREENHALGH. A two-fer, with no commercial

interruptions.

"Threats of law suits against journalists have become the hallmark of

the Bush administration in a not too clever tactic used to silence

independent media in the U.S. -Wayne Madsen

Web

http://www.madcowprod.com

The Election Services Series

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12/04

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Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals

11/04

"The Big Fix 2004" Part Two: Election Company Has Long Criminal History

11/04 "The Big Fix 2004" : How to Fix a Presidential Election

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