DuPage County Election Commission--Can't We Sue These Assholes?

[orleans]

and now, more news from shangri-la

(from the county where an employee of lt. gov. wannabe joe birkett was heard saying: "we don't prosecute sexual abuse in dupage county")

Election commission hasn’t exactly earned full vote of confidence

John Zimmerman
Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006

That each and every American eligible to vote can make choices on whom they believe would best represent them in government is what makes living in a democracy so right.

But in planning an election, those running the election must anticipate everything that can go wrong. And troubleshoot accordingly.

And election administrators cannot put themselves in a position of being accused of conflicts of interest in awarding contracts. Not when they are overseers of one of the most sacred outcomes of our nation taking up arms for liberty.

Yet the DuPage Election Commission has come up short in both of these areas.

I’m not thinking that the commission should never have introduced electronic voting machines that critics say have design flaws that can compromise the vote and can’t be secured. I’m not sure of that yet, and those voting machines have been a blessing to disabled people who are now able to cast a secret ballot. But groups like the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project raise good points against those machines to keep my mind open.

I raised a point of my own in an interview with Bob Saar, executive director of the DuPage County Election Commission. And the resulting discussion left me a bit disconcerted.

Computerized machines — like those in the DuPage County polling places — are not foolproof. If a vote-gatherer goes awry in one of those polling places, a technical expert is sent out to make repairs. And you want someone with the very best computer maintenance skills to fix things right.

But you also want to make sure those technical people aren’t going to use their expertise to hack machines out of maliciousness or to serve some political purpose for financial gain. Which means doing character checks.

Yet the commission does not do criminal background screening on these techs. Saar told me as much, but added it’s probably a good idea to start doing such screening.

Is it highly likely that a tech with a criminal conviction and a personal or partisan interest in messing up the vote results would be servicing voting machines? No. But again, you have to anticipate everything that can go wrong.

What I also find disturbing is a conflict of interest evident in the commission’s handling of some contracts.

When former DuPage County Recorder J.P. “Rick” Carney, retired in 2004, Fidlar Election Co. put $9,000 toward his farewell dinner tab. Carney has also accepted campaign contributions from Fidlar.

Fidlar just happens to sell Diebold’s touch-screen voting machines, which have been criticized for having security flaws. Those machines are being used in DuPage County.

And in his capacity as a DuPage County Election Commission board member, Carney's participated in a December 2005 vote to spend more than $4 million on 732 electronic voting machines produced by Diebold Election Systems.

Carney doesn’t see a conflict because he has never accepted a campaign contribution from Diebold. And he said he ended Fidlar’s contract with the commission when he was appointed to the board. But it would have been best for Carney to have recused himself from the vote on Diebold contract.

And it’s not as if the commission has made a clean break from Fidlar. A former Fidlar salesperson is now running a business that has a contract with the commission for printing services, as disclosed by the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project and confirmed by Saar.

This is the kind of thing that enrages people sick of government making deals that might be legal but smell foul of favoritism. If any governing unit should have a firm policy against awarding contracts that might even appear to be in conflict, it is the group in charge of running honest, efficient elections.

Even Carney seems to agree that the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project is right to raise an eyebrow over his vote on Diebold.

“I actually think it’s a pretty good criticism,” he said. “It makes sense.”

That it does. Give Carney credit for being blunt. More so, hope the election commission takes the criticism to heart.

http://www.dailyherald.com/opinion/zimmerman.asp