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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 e xample,
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.
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