Conny's Final Ballot
L.A.'s elections chief is gone, but it's no loss for fans of democracy
No need to shed a tear for Los Angeles' top elections administrator, Conny McCormack, who has announced her intention to retire in December after 12 years on the job. This was no routine decision to bow out after a satisfyingly long run. McCormack is mad as hell that the movement for fair and transparent elections finally got the better of her.
Yes, you read that right. The elections chief in the most populous county in the United States - with more than 4 million registered voters, and almost 5,000 precincts - has been working against the cause of better-run elections for the past several years. Not only did she fall for electronic touch-screen voting machines, at precisely the time when the country's top computer scientists were discovering that they were riddled with lousy software and prone to undetectable manipulation. She lobbied for them tirelessly, nastily, and in ways that raised serious questions about her professional ethics.
When one Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, raised a stink about Diebold Election Systems and decertified their top-of-the-line machine in 2004, McCormack responded by casually wondering if Shelley might "drop dead tomorrow."
When another Secretary of State, the current incumbent Debra Bowen, ordered the statewide decertification of almost every class of touch-screen machine, on the grounds that they were demonstrably incapable of maintaining the integrity of the vote, McCormack accused her of throwing the entire electoral system into chaos to score a few political points - voting integrity apparently being just one more special interest in her book, like the insurance industry or the Howard Jarvis association.
McCormack is far from a fool, and certainly qualified for the job, carrying almost 20 years of election administration experience, both in the United States and abroad, before she even began the job as L.A. County Registrar-Recorder. That, though, has only made her intransigence all the more galling.
Several times, McCormack has been caught indulging in suspect behavior. One could go back to her first big job as elections chief in Dallas, where a mysterious power failure in the central vote tabulation system on the night of a contentious mayoral election in 1985 appeared to seal the paper-thin reelection of the incumbent. Over the next several days, McCormack couldn't keep the overall number of voters straight and failed to provide key records to state investigators.
More recently, in 2003, she was caught ordering changes to the software on her Diebold-made early voting machines without bothering to have the changes certified by the state, as required by law. McCormack responded indignantly that her office had been making last-minute, unauthorized changes to voting equipment for the past 30 years - which of course only made the infraction seem worse.
In 2004, McCormack and her husband gave their blessing to a lobbying film for the voting-machine companies that sought to demonstrate that a paper trail, demanded by Secretary of State Shelley to make the touch-screen machines more easily auditable, was a wash with the voters. The film even bore the L.A. County seal - giving the highly partisan short the veneer of a public service announcement.
McCormack's most visible - and, in some ways, most mystifying - role has been as a multi-purpose Diebold cheerleader. Until Kevin Shelley put a serious spanner into her works, she had ambitions to spend $100 million of this county's money on a full-blown Diebold touch-screen system. (The InkaVote system we have instead was initially introduced as a stopgap measure following the scrapping of the old punch card machines.)
One of her best friends is Deborah Seiler, who was Diebold West Coast sales rep for years. (Seiler is currently elections chief in San Diego and may be a candidate to take over here in L.A. - let's hope not.) Not so long ago, McCormack allowed her photograph, and some choice words of praise, to adorn a Diebold company brochure. Her cheerleading has been mystifying precisely because she never quite put her money where her mouth was. L.A. has used Diebold early voting terminals for the past four years, but never went the whole hog like Alameda, Solano, and a clutch of other counties now suffering a chronic case of buyers' remorse. InkaVote is made by Diebold's rival, Election Systems & Software. Still, McCormack has more often sounded like a representative of the voting machine companies than she was an advocate for clean elections. At a public meeting a few weeks ago, she responded indignantly to one of Secretary of State Bowen's new stipulations on electronic voting by wondering how much it was going to cost the voting machine companies. That, in turn, earned her a rebuke from Superivisor Gloria Molina, who countered: "I don't understand why you are so protective of the vendors ... It's really none of our business. It shouldn't be in our interest to protect the vendors' profits."
McCormack will be gone with barely a month to go before California's presidential primary. She said in her retirement statement that she intended to go into "election administration research and consulting." Don't be surprised if one of her new benefactors turns out to be a voting machine company.
Florida gadfly's most recent run-in with the law
An update, meanwhile, on Charlie Grapski, a political science professor, rabble-rouser, and erstwhile candidate for political office in the small Florida town of Alachua whom I wrote about last year. Back then, the news was that allies of the woman he was running against for a state Assembly seat had decided to arrest him - on the highly dubious grounds that he had tape-recorded an interview with the Alacha city manager without his permission.
Now things have gotten a whole lot worse for Grapski, who has been a one-man bug in the ass of the local political establishment, investigating absentee ballot fraud in numerous close elections and all manner of other seemingly corrupt practices.
A month ago, the city police chief got wind of a possible bad check Grapski had written at a local gas station. Chief Robert Jernigan took it upon himself to take the check to Grapski's bank and look up his account records - a decision that enraged Grapski to no end because it seemed to him a violation of his privacy and a piece of pure political revenge by one of his long-time local adversaries. (The check cleared, although there is some question about how much money he had in his account on the day he wrote it.)
When Grapski went to chief Jernigan's office in mid-August to ask for a copy of his report, he wound up badly beaten and under arrest for trespass, resisting arrest, and battering a police officer. Quite what happened remains a mystery - the police say he became unreasonable and violent and had to be restrained; Grapski's friends say he was simply set upon and had his head bashed against a heavy door. A local newspaper later reported seeing him in a wheelchair in jail with black bruises all over his arms and a cut on his face.
Bail was set at a ludicrously high $60,000, making it impossible for him to get out of the local lock-up. So he went on a hunger strike. After about a week, the city and the courts negotiated an agreement whereby his bail would be reduced to $1,500, allowing him to get out of jail, and he, in exchange, would not talk to any official from city hall or the police department. He has been out for just a few days, and still in great pain.
It's hard to know where to begin with the questions this story raises. Suffice to say that when opponents of any government - be it a small town in Florida or a Middle Eastern oil state - get beaten up, thrown into jail, and barred from participating in public life, something is very wrong with the body politic. We don't live in a tinpot dictatorship, but the citizens of Alachua just might.
Published: 09/06/2007
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