Soft touches

An editorial in Sunday's New York Times notes the discomforting fact that too many state and local election officials who insist on the safety and security of touchscreen voting actually have financial ties to voting machine companies whose work and worth they are judging.

A disturbing number end up working for voting machine companies. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. The list goes on.

The editorial goes on to note that the Election Center, which does election training and policy work, takes money from Diebold and other machine companies.

At the center's national conference last month, the companies underwrote meals and a dinner cruise.

Forty-three percent of the budget of the National Association of Secretaries of State comes from voting machine companies and other vendors, and at its conference this summer in New Orleans, Accenture, which compiles voter registration databases for states, sponsored a dinner at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

There are also reports of election officials being directly offered gifts. Last year, the Columbus Dispatch reported that a voting machine company was offering concert tickets and limousine rides while competing for a contract worth as much as $100 million, if not more. ...

If election officials want credibility in this national discussion, they must do more to demonstrate that their only loyalty is to the voter.

I'd say "amen to that" except for the fact that these officials have already shown that their loyalty is not to the voter - otherwise they'd be listening to the experts who not only claim the machines can be manipulated, but have shown how it can be done. In fact, they wouldn't have even needed that, because the idea of farming out elections to private companies using proprietary technology that in most cases public officials are not even allowed to examine, much less double-check, would be anathema. So it's clear that their higher loyalty is to corporate donations to their conferences, banquests, and dinner cruises.

Footnote: The Times notes that its series of editorials on Making Votes Count "remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount."