Cutting out the middle man

By now we've all heard ominous stories about the potential for felonious manipulation of election results in elections conducted with electronic ballot machines.

Here in King County, WA, though, election officials, perhaps with an eye to increased efficiency in government, have cut through a couple steps and gone directly to the employment of felons to design, print and sort the ballots.

The Seattle Weekly report in this week's issue details the involvement of Jeff Dean, convicted on 23 counts of embezzlement by manipulating the computer records of a law firm, and John Elder, who served time with Dean at the state's Cedar Creek Corrections Center on a cocaine dealing charge, in the work of the King County Records and Elections department.

I can't really draw hard conclusions from the information in the article, but at the very least it appears that Dean was employed to develop voting software without revealing his criminal background, despite such revealation being a condition of his original sentence.

The image issues alone are a problem, though, for a Department that's been plagued with problems in the recent past (the last two Directors of Records and Elections have lost their jobs as a result of various problems in delivering absentee ballots and other snafus), and Elder's supervisory postion with Diebold, which holds a County contact related to absentee ballot production, distribution and sorting is enough to bring out the conspiracy theorist in many folks.

The pair may well have rehabilitated themselves, but the County really doesn't need the heat. I'll keep tracking this one.