W. VA gives E-Voting VP award while machines malfunction

A day after West Virginia secretary of state Betty Ireland held a press conference to address vote-switching problems with touchscreen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, she presented an award of merit to an ES&S vice president, who had abruptly and mysteriously left the company in May after 11 years of service, according to the Charleston Gazette. Gary Greenhalgh, as ES&S's vice president of sales, helped the company win a $17-million contract to supply machines to West Virginia in 2005 and was the company's point person for dealing with election officials until he left ES&S. Last week, Ireland gave him a Medallion Award from the National Association of Secretaries of State at a special ceremony. The award came the same week that voters in several West Virginia counties reported that ES&S's iVotronic touchscreen machines were flipping their votes from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Republican rival John McCain. Ireland addressed the problem by directing the 34 West Virginia counties that use the touchscreen machines to re-calibrate them each morning during early voting and on election day. At the ceremony honoring Greenhalgh, Ireland said the Medallion Award was given to people who have "established a very distinctive record in areas including responsible citizenship, voter registration, use of technology and service to local elected officials and county government." Ireland seemed less satisfied with Greenhalgh's record two years ago, when she filed a formal complaint against ES&S with the federal Election Assistance Commission, the body that oversees federal testing and certification of voting machines. She called for an audit of the company's contractual performance. The complaint charged ES&S with failing to program and deliver voting machines to county officials in time for testing before that year's May primary, forcing some counties to fall back to paper ballots. ES&S failed to provide accessible voting machines to counties by the time early voting in the primary began, despite promises that the machines would be supplied months earlier. That delay put the state in violation of a federal law that required every voting precinct in the country to have at least one accessible voting machine for disabled voters by January 1, 2006 elections. "I am more than upset that our county clerks and their staffs and the county commissions had to withstand stress and anxiety over the broken promises and delays ES&S put them through," Ireland said in a press release at the time. "The county election officials are to be commended for their valor and hard work above and beyond the call of duty." She also said in the statement that "ES&S was chosen to provide West Virginia's voting machines partly based on its local connection, its past service in the state, and its knowledge of West Virginia election deadlines and procedures. Unfortunately, we now feel ES&S let West Virginia down." The "local connection" refers in part to Greenhalgh, who lives in West Virginia with his wife. Greenhalgh has been the source of specific frustration in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where he and the company are accused of repeatedly missing deadlines and making mistakes on voting materials. Threat Level obtained a series of letters and faxes the county's commissioners sent to Greenhalgh in 2006 complaining about repeated delays, broken promises and poor equipment. In one fax to Greenhalgh, Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper complained that a printer ES&S provided for the county's central tabulation system must have come from a "Cracker Jacks" box. The county uses optical-scan machines made by ES&S as well as its AutoMark system for disabled voters. The AutoMark provides a touchscreen, Braille keyboard and audio feed for voters and produces a paper ballot that is scanned through an optical reader. Greenhalgh is a former Federal Election Commission official and was largely responsible for creating the voting system standards that were developed in the 1980s that were used for testing and certifying Diebold and ES&S voting systems, as well as others, for two decades. In the late 1970's, long before he went to work for ES&S, Greenhalgh helped organize election officials to lobby Congress to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to establish the standards. He personally pushed the amendment into conference in the Senate and then hired the person who wrote the standards, Bob Naegele. He did this, ironically, to address problems that election officials were having with voting machine vendors who would sell their machines to states then fail to provide adequate customer service afterward or go out of business. Neither Greenhalgh nor ES&S responded to a call for comment from Threat Level, but in 2004 I interviewed Greenhalgh about the voting system standards and he explained the motivation for establishing them. "A number of us got together and said that we need to come up with baseline national standards that everyone needs to meet so that we don't have election officials victimized by these small companies that didn't have any real interest in staying in the business and making things work correctly," he said. With regard to Greenhalgh's recent departure from ES&S, the Charleston Gazette reports that neither Greenhalgh nor ES&S would discuss the reason for his leaving the company. His wife, Jane Greenhalgh, is now project director for ES&S in West Virginia, but when the Gazette asked him whether his wife worked for ES&S, Greenhalgh replied, "I have no idea" and refused to answer any questions. Reminiscent of the complaints against her husband, Jane Greenhalgh received her own complaint from Kanawha County this month after officials discovered that an ES&S sub-contractor had misprogrammed voting machine PCMCIA cards ahead of a state Supreme Court race. The programming error would have caused the machines to mis-record votes when a voter opted to vote a straight Republican ticket, but chose one Democratic candidate in the Supreme Court race. The state had to have the PCMCIA cards re-programmed quickly to keep Democratic votes from being discarded. In a fax sent from Commission president Kent Carper to Jane Greenhalgh about a week before her husband received his award, Carper wrote that he continued to be "amazed at the lack of attention on the part of ES&S, not only to Kanawha County, but the entire State of West Virginia." Carper writes that the change in leadership that occurred when Jane Greenhalgh replaced her husband as ES&S's representative in West Virginia "has not improved the lack of commitment made by ES&S to this State." Carper said, "When you spend the kind of tax dollars that we spent on these machines, you shouldn't have programming errors the day before early voting starts. You shouldn't have cards fail." For his part, Gary Greenhalgh didn't completely leave the ES&S fold after he left the company in May. According to the Charleston Gazette, he now works as a regional account manager for Casto & Harris, Inc., the subcontractor that misprogrammed the PCMCIA cards in the Supreme Court race. It's not known who was responsible for calibrating the touchscreen machines that were flipping votes last week.