San Diego has recently hired not one BUT TWO suspicious characters to the Registrar of Voters in recent months- and people are pissed. The outrage sparked a protest at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday evening.
The first hiring was Michael Vu, who was registrar of voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Mr. Vu presided over two assistants who were convicted of illegally rigging the 2004 election recount. They refused to testify against Vu, who subsequently stepped down.
In addition, a bi-partisan panel was established by the Cuyahoga County Elections Board to investigate the debacle of the 2006 May primary election, an unmitigated disaster .
Five days before the report by the Cuyahoga County board was made public, the county of San Diego hired Vu as Assistant Registrar of Voters. The report was damning for Vu- he had failed to take warnings about the Diebold machines seriously, resulting in an "across the board failure."
Did Walt Ekard, San Diego Chief Adminstrative Officer, know of the damning contents of the Ohio report, and expedite Vu's hiring? Or, if they weren't aware of the reports contents, shouldn't his hiring be re-asessed in light of the fact that it cites Vu as incompetent and unethical?
As aghast as voters were with the hiring of Vu, the other shoe dropped in the form of Deborah Seiler, who was hired as San Diego County Registrar of Voters on May 11th. Seiler has set up permanent housekeeping in that revolving door between the voting machine manufacturers and public positions in the registrars office. In fact, Googling Ms. Seiler is an exercise in vertigo. She alternates between being a high-powered PR person and saleswoman for Diebold, Sequoia and assorted trade associations. Ms. Seiler is now the Registrar of Voters for San Diego county and a staunch supporter of Diebold voting machines. It was Ms. Seiler, while wearing her Diebold hat, who sold San Diego County 10,000 Diebold machines at a cost of 31 million dollars
The combination of an official with a history of ties to election fraud and an official with close ties to Diebold proved too much for vigilant San Diegans and a protest took place at the last county supervisor's meeting. Let's keep the pressure on and make sure the integrity of the voting process is preserved. If we don't, San Diego may well become 2008's Cuyahoga County.
Note: This diary is a reworking of a previous attempt here.