Diebold Rep Now Runs Elections

Sept. 30, 2004

An influential employee of voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems left the company recently to take a job as elections manager for a California county.

Deborah Seiler, a sales representative for the beleaguered voting company, was hired a week ago and started Monday in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco in California's wine country. The position puts her second in command of elections in the county, under the registrar of voters.

The move raises eyebrows because Seiler played a role in a recent scandal involving Diebold and the county. As the Diebold sales rep, Seiler sold Solano County nearly 1,200 touch-screen machines that were not federally tested or state certified. When the state banned the machines because of Diebold's business practices, the county had to find a replacement for the machines and pay Diebold more than $400,000 to get out of its contract.

"This is outrageous. This is just a total runaround of the democratic process," said Douglas MacDonald, of the Community Labor Alliance, an activist group that pressured Solano County to end its contract with Diebold. "There was an open debate and discussion, and the county (supervisors) decided that Diebold is not the company, is not the philosophy, that we want behind the running of elections in Solano County. Then what happens? They go out and hire the person who was advocating that philosophy."

[...] California and other states have had a history of revolving doors between election offices and voting vendors. Voting companies hire election officials as sales representatives and consultants to take advantage of their connections and camaraderie with other election officials in order to gain advantage over competitors bidding for multimillion-dollar contracts. Some voters have voiced concerns about the conflicts of interest.

Seiler's move is a rare one, however -- an election official who left state employment to go work for a voting company, then came back to elections.

Before taking the job with Diebold, Seiler was California's chief of elections in the secretary of state's office for 12 years. She was heavily involved in election legislation, consulting with the state assembly committee on election legislation, and played a large role in crafting the state's election code, according to Rosenthal. In 1991, she quit her job in the secretary of state's office and went to work for the elections industry, working eight years for Sequoia Voting Systems, a competitor of Diebold, before moving to Diebold.

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