- An influential employee of voting machine maker Diebold
Election Systems left the company recently to take a job as elections manager
for a California county.
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- Deborah Seiler, a sales representative for the beleaguered
voting company, was hired a week ago and started Monday in Solano County,
northeast of San Francisco in California's wine country. The position puts
her second in command of elections in the county, under the registrar of
voters.
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- The move raises eyebrows because Seiler played a role
in a recent scandal involving Diebold and the county. As the Diebold sales
rep, Seiler sold Solano County nearly 1,200 touch-screen machines that
were not federally tested or state certified. When the state banned the
machines because of Diebold's business practices, the county had to find
a replacement for the machines and pay Diebold more than $400,000 to get
out of its contract.
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- "This is outrageous. This is just a total runaround
of the democratic process," said Douglas MacDonald, of the Community
Labor Alliance, an activist group that pressured Solano County to end its
contract with Diebold. "There was an open debate and discussion, and
the county (supervisors) decided that Diebold is not the company, is not
the philosophy, that we want behind the running of elections in Solano
County. Then what happens? They go out and hire the person who was advocating
that philosophy."
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- But Ira Rosenthal, Solano County's registrar of voters
and chief information officer, defended the hire, saying that Seiler was
the best-qualified candidate for the job. She had been California's chief
elections official in the mid-1980s before taking the job with Diebold.
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- "We have to look at the track record of the person
and what she knows," Rosenthal said. "We had a very successful
election in the March primary (with the Diebold machines). We had not one
issue. She was instrumental in helping us get that off the ground."
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- Rosenthal said only four candidates applied for the job,
which became available in May, and three of them were employees of voting
machine companies. He declined to name the other companies.
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- California and other states have had a history of revolving
doors between election offices and voting vendors. Voting companies hire
election officials as sales representatives and consultants to take advantage
of their connections and camaraderie with other election officials in order
to gain advantage over competitors bidding for multimillion-dollar contracts.
Some voters have voiced concerns about the conflicts of interest.
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- Seiler's move is a rare one, however -- an election official
who left state employment to go work for a voting company, then came back
to elections.
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- Before taking the job with Diebold, Seiler was California's
chief of elections in the secretary of state's office for 12 years. She
was heavily involved in election legislation, consulting with the state
assembly committee on election legislation, and played a large role in
crafting the state's election code, according to Rosenthal. In 1991, she
quit her job in the secretary of state's office and went to work for the
elections industry, working eight years for Sequoia Voting Systems, a competitor
of Diebold, before moving to Diebold.
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- "If somebody knows elections in California, it's
her," Rosenthal said. "She fills this gap in experience in our
department."
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- Kim Alexander, founder and president of the nonprofit,
nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said, "There's no doubt that
Deborah Seiler is one of the most experienced in California elections.
But I find it confusing that the county would hire someone who played a
role in their acquisition of uncertified equipment."
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- Solano County canceled its $4.1 million contract with
Diebold in April, following a series of hearings in which the secretary
of state's office revealed that Diebold had installed uncertified software
on machines in 17 California counties, violating state election laws. The
state also accused the company of misleading state officials about certification
issues.
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- Solano had purchased and already taken delivery of Diebold's
new AccuVote-TSx touch-screen voting machines last year, with the understanding
that the system had been federally tested and was about to be state certified.
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- According to news reports at the time, Seiler assured
Solano supervisors last November that Diebold's machines had already received
certification, though she was unable to produce a copy of the letter verifying
that.
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- "There is no doubt on the certification of this
equipment," Seiler was quoted in a local paper.
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- Seiler did not respond to a request for comment.
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- But the system hadn't been certified and when state officials
learned that the system they were planning to certify was not exactly the
same system Diebold had submitted to federal testing labs, they canceled
plans to certify the system.
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- The state then prohibited Solano and three other counties
from using the TSx machines, forcing them to find another system only a
few months before the presidential elections. The state's attorney general
is currently pursuing a false claims suit against Diebold alleging the
company aggressively marketed a system it knew was not tested or approved
by federal authorities.
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- After the scandal erupted, Diebold attempted to keep
Solano as a customer, promising to outfit the county for November with
free optical-scan machines that were certified, with the option of keeping
the machines after the election or switching back to touch-screen machines
once they were certified.
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- But county supervisors rejected the offer, even though
it would cost them to terminate the Diebold contract, citing concerns about
Diebold's business practices and voter confidence. Registrar of voters
Laura Winslow, who had been a staunch supporter of Diebold and the touch-screen
machines, resigned after the state's ban on the machines.
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- Solano County Supervisor John Silva, who only learned
of the hiring Tuesday after Seiler started work, said he wouldn't comment
on internal election department hiring. Fellow Supervisor Barbara Kondylis
didn't return calls for comment, but she told a local paper she heard about
the hiring only from another employee.
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- "I am so angry," she told the Fairfield Daily
Republic. "And it's done without telling us." She said that although
Seiler's qualifications were "excellent," she was concerned how
voters would view the hiring.
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- Voting activist MacDonald was clear on how he felt about
it.
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- "We spent seven months working to get Diebold out
of Solano, now they've come in the back door," he said. "We need
someone who is as open and forthcoming as possible running our elections,
and that's the exact opposite of the corporate culture she's coming from.
The veil that we worked so hard to take down, is now sliding back in."
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