Opinion: Good Conny? Bad Conny?

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Did Conny B. McCormack retire from her post as Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/clerk, or did she resign in protest? Did she recklessly damage voter confidence in the nation’s most populous county by sticking around as long as she did, or is she recklessly abandoning the county just before the 2008 primary? Or all of the above?

All of the above, according to the Brad Blog and other critics of electronic voting systems and of registrars, like McCormack, who defend them. The blog is giving readers a chance to vote (electronically) on where they think McCormack will work next, with the choices including the four allegedly tainted companies: Diebold/Premier, Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart, and Election Systems & Software Inc. All produce voting systems decertified several weeks ago by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

In her retirement statement McCormack said she wanted to shift her ‘energies and experience to election administration and research and consulting both within the U.S. and worldwide.’ This evening she said that didn’t mean going to work for one of her department’s voting equipment contractors. ‘You won’t find me as a Diebold spokesman, or ES&S, or any of them,’ she told me.

Still, to critics of electronic voting, McCormack will likely continue to be dismissed as a shill for vendors who at best want to foist bad software and faulty machinery onto the public, at public expense, and at worst are part of a cabal to allow conservative Republicans to steal elections.

There is no denying that McCormack foolishly allowed her photo to be reproduced on a Diebold brochure, giving fuel to assertions that she is looking out for the interests of voting companies. She didn’t help her case any when she told county supervisors that vendors wouldn’t make much money in Los Angeles County if they have to pay for every ballot to be hand-counted.

What McCormack could have said, and should have said, was that the county could be left without vendors of election machines at all if they can’t make any money here. That outcome may be just fine, especially if the companies produce systems that are easily corrupted. The point is that McCormack had frontline, practical experience in running elections in the nation’s largest county. That may have led her to be too close to vendors; it also provided the county with fairly smooth voting days here, especially considering the number of elections (88 cities, the county, statewide elections) and the volume of ballots. If California’s February primary also goes smoothly, McCormack will no doubt be blasted for having complained that Bowen’s decertification decision [pdf] would throw voting day into chaos. If there are problems, she’ll be branded as the person who left things in disarray.

The Times editorial page noted the severe problems found in Bowen’s top-to-bottom review of California voting systems and backed her decision to decertify. But the page also expressed alarm at the politicization, however unintentional, of the process. Bowen, a Democrat, reversed certification decisions made by her predecessor, Republican Bruce McPherson [pdf], six months earlier. The next secretary of state could reverse all over again--unless certification decisions are turned over to a nonpartisan (or at least bipartisan) panel, as they once were in California.