Blogged by Brad from St. Louis…
Finally! Someone in the mainstream media asks the question that’s been answered long ago. At least to those paying attention.
Kudos to Steven Harmon of the MediaNews Sacramento Bureau for finally discussing it out loud in the several mainstream California media outlets that ran his excellent story over the weekend.
And feel free to laugh out loud at the embarrassing comments by Steve Weir, Registrar of Voters for Contra Costa, CA, and President of the CA Association of Clerks and Elections (CACEO), when he says: “Is the relationship between clerks and vendors an indication of something?…Is it pervasive and nefarious? I don’t see it.”
Though in the next breath Weir says: “It’s been a tight-knit community for years and years, and that relationship might have been too close.” Oh, do ya think?
Then comes the following guffaw, courtesy of Sequoia’s professional liar/damage control expert/document doctorer, Michelle Shafer, when she says: “There’s nothing odd about our relations with our customers…We support conferences and educational events that election officials and staffs attend. Without this support and sponsorship, it would be very hard for these organizations to conduct conferences or have meaningful programming.”
(Please note, Shafer is now also the lead lobbyist for the Electronic Technology Council (ETC), the desperate voting machine company trade group.)
Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote, gets it absolutely right in reply when he says: “[The voting machine companies] went about selling their machines by schmoozing people into believing this would be a great American solution…Now, after they bought into this, county registrars can’t tell if the system doesn’t work, because it suits them so well from a bureaucratic point of view. They spent a lot of money and don’t want to admit they were wrong.”
Bingo.
I agree. This is truly a great story to read in the MSM for once. I hope we can see more. We should all write to the article’s writer to commend him for such a well researched and forthright piece.
An well balanced portrayal of the issue Brad. It is a good practice to give credit where it is due.
If I was sarcastic :), I would say “Wow, they ae getting the concept of conflict of interest 101, the elementary or obvious phase.”
But it is also true that we are in a world of hurt when our “wisdom” is composed of the obvious.
And we are even worse off when people like Steve Weir “don’t see it [the obvious].”
Notice again, the word “customers” with no mention of democracy, like the DIEBOLD/Premier spokesperson saying we can “focus on our customers” better. So, we’re “customers”! That’s TWO companies now, categorizing democracy as their “customers”.
re post #2
If I could type I would say “A well balanced” instead of “An well balanced”; “they are getting” instead of “they ae getting”.
But alas typos are a part of my life and so it goes.
Big Dan #3
Good point. This article seems to portray “Iraqi democracy” as a customer too.
There is a distinct difference between a customer, a client, and a principal, which the media, election officials, and EVM vendors have blurred.
In so doing they cannot see the conflict of interest.
*bfg*
Feels good to be part of the changes, doesn’t it?
Can I do a Colbert word thingy? The word is “contempt”
It seems that election officials and their twins the EVM vendors are in contempt of the people’s interests.
Who in bushiedom these daze isn’t? The Forestry Service, Vice President, and the Executive Branch (doesn’t include VP he says), are contemptuous of congress.
They are the leaders, so every bushie thinks one must be in contempt of the people’s will to be cool.
The people want paper ballots, so give them DRE’s; the people want the troops out of Iraq, so send more troops there; the people want Libby jailed, so pardon him; the people want rid of Gonzales, so keep him; the people don’t want to be spied on, so spy on them night and day; the people want the press free to tell them the truth; so the press becomes embedded and believes that the people can’t handle the truth; and on and on and on ad nauseum.
Contempt, its not just for everyday common criminals anymore, its for the darling bushies too.
Big Brother is a bushie in contempt of the people.
This is common in govt. As the agencies have no expertise in a subject, they rely on vendors and lobbyists for info. How do you think police forces buy and train on radar/laser units? Company sales forces do it for them. Then they train themselves the same way, skipping the flaws because they were never told about them in the first place, and don’t know the units are malfunctioning.
It will never get anywhere. The mass media has a vested interest in keeping as many Republicans in power as possible, because the Rs will let the “news” outlets merge across media as well as to continue conglomeration. The newspaper and TV station owners, as well as the big five, don’t want Democrats to come in and regulate or even (heaven forbid) bust the media up into competitive pieces. So don’t expect to see much in the media about insuring fair vote counts.