If you've at all been following the election woes of San Diego County, you've undoubtedly heard of Mikal Haas. He oversaw the anointment of Brian Bilbray to the Congressional seat previously held by Duke Cunningham. The shenanigans that he and others went through to do it made a lot of heat that even got to our famously impervious Board of Supervisors.
It seemed at last that the nightmare was over when Haas announced he was stepping down. Alas, the Supervisors' daliance with responsibility was short lived; Haas wasn't really going away, he just got promoted. Still, Haas wouldn't be running the elections. Certainly whatever choice the Supervisors made couldn't be worse, could it?
Of course, there is the chance that it won't be worse. I'm not betting on it. The new choice to be our Registrar was Deborah Seiler, who amongst her many accomplishments can count several years service as a sales representative for Diebold, the company that makes our county's lovely touch-screen voting machines.
If that weren't enough, the County also chose Michael Vu, late of the
2004 Cuyahoga County, Ohio Registrar's office recount fiasco, to be her assistant. The uproar was rather fierce for San Diego. The Supervisors might have seen just how much San Diegans care about clean elections if they'd have actually been listening. I wrote about a recent confrontation at our last Supervisors' meeting here.
After the meeting it seemed as if the whole issue went underground for a while. I began to realize that I didn't know that much about Ms. Seiler beyond her resume and one small picture. So, it was with great anticipation that I tuned into KPBS-TV's "Full Focus" program to see an interview with Ms. Seiler, conducted by that ever intreptid graduate of the Baba Wawa School of Hard-Hitting Broadcast Journalism, Gloria Penner.
Now I will admit I am not a fan of touch screen voting machines, whether made by Diebold or anyone else. I vote by mail in the hope of avoiding them (a hope that may have been dashed if the rumors that the Registrar simply counted the mail votes by having them manually entered into Diebold touch screen machines). It will take a lot to convince me that Deborah Seiler is an acceptable Registrar, and the County had a lot riding on that interview as far as I'm concerrned.
So here it is:
Deborah Seiler Interview on KPBS
I must say that it did not go well for the County, Ms. Seiler, and especially Diebold; in fact I'm madder than ever. I am convinced that Diebold has succeded in building a remarkably life-like humanoid robot, which it has named Deborah Seiler. We paid good money for those voting machines, and we got unreliable, hackale junk, while all the time the company had reliable, dependable, long-running truth shredding machines like Seiler on the shelf.
I hope this can be a lesson to us all. We can have fair and efficient elections, and Ms. Seiler proves it, even if not in the way she may have intended.