Gentry LANGE for King County Executive
NEWS ADVISORY
September 29th, 2005 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Election Center Funded by Corporate Voting Machine Providers, Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and more
King County Council hires the Corporate “Fox” to Whitewash the Election “Hen House”
King County, WA. -- The King County council has outsourced their responsibility to audit King County's Election System to a private company, The Election Center. Yet, The Election Center regularly takes contributions from Diebold and other voting machine companies (New York Times of September 12, 2004
Click Here For New York Times Article
These companies currently receive millions of tax dollars from sales of voting machines to governments, and incumbent King County Executive Ron Sims helped bring Diebold machines into King County.
Diebold and Election Systems (also with voting machines in King County) have been highly criticized for their faulty touch screen voting machines and lax security procedures, and are now under pressure from activists over their Optical Scan machines currently in use throughout King County. According to computer experts the Diebold Optical Scan system is highly vulnerable to manipulation at the "central tabulator" level.
Gentry Lange, voting activist and Green challenger for King County Executive states, "The system now in King County is untrustworthy, and the problem is deeper than who controls the Council, Executive position and Elections office, as Ron Sims and David Irons might have you believe. The problem is that private, for profit, politically connected corporations have taken over the machines and computer software that record and count our votes. They wine and dine election officials at national conferences and pay for the experts (NYT: September 12, 2004). King County has hired the Election Center, which is directly funded by the voting machine industry to provide a PR solution. It won't surprise me when the Election Center fails to recommend the intelligent choice, Publicly-Owned Open Source Software."
The NYT reports, "Forty-three percent of the budget of the National Association of Secretaries of State comes from voting machine companies and other vendors." This influence is reflected in Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed's repeated stated confidence in the current voting machines.
Lange continues, "The Council voted 9-0 to hire the Election Center as the independent contractor for this audit, over three other vendors, and Sims went along with this. This unanimous council decision demonstrates no one on the council either cared about or knew about the obvious conflict of interest the Election Center presented, even though this information was in the New York Times, as well as The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=1708). So this problem is deeper than the Executive, deeper than the council; it is blind faith by Ron Sims, David Irons and the rest of the King County Council in outsourcing their responsibility to private corporations., instead of running the government and doing the jobs for which they were elected.”
"As a candidate for King County Executive, I will fix this problem in my first term. Elections should not be about partisan debate; I offer a choice outside the partisan bickering," concluded Lange.
Gentry Lange is a voting activist experienced in voting reform campaigns in King County and Washington State. As Andy Stephenson's campaign manager in the 2004 Secretary of State contest, Lange helped break national news regarding problems in King County's election system. Over the past several years, Lange has been both an independent journalist and a long-time political activist in Seattle in a growing number of local and statewide campaigns.
"For starters, we need to get corporations like Diebold and Election Systems out of King County's elections. Corporations do not deserve the right to keep the election process secret from public inspection. We need both open-source code for the election computing systems and an open-source process which does not outsource to secretive private for-profit companies the responsibility to conduct fair, accurate, and open elections. Using proprietary software, Diebold and companies like it are effectively counting our elections behind closed doors and then telling us election results when they are done," states Lange.
"Democrats and Republicans alike need to realize that until the King County, Washington State, and national elections systems are wrested from partisan corporate secret control, we can never trust the system again. As reform, Ron Sims proposes a type of shuffling of the corporate 'deck chairs' by sending all of your ballots through the mail to a different private corporation, PSI Group. I propose getting PSI, Diebold, any every other private company with clear conflicts of interest out of our elections system entirely. As King County Executive, I will fix the voting system in King County by the next time I am up for election."
Gentry Lange is a real estate agent and homeowner who resides and votes in the city of Shoreline.
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For more information contact:
Priority Media Phone Contact: (206) 498.3937
E-mail: gentry@gentrylange.com
Web Site: http://www.gentrylange.com