Voting group leery of state contractor, pending lawsuit

By Mark Binker    Greensboro News-Record   13 November 2005

RALEIGH The man hired to help North Carolina determine which voting machines counties should use has extensive experience working for two of the manufacturers submitting bids to the state.

Whether that experience should be considered asset or liability depends on who's talking.

Keith Long's job is to find vendors to sell voting equipment to local election boards and determine whether that equipment meets federal and state guidelines.

As recently as Oct. 1, 2004, Long worked for Diebold Election Systems, and between 1983 and 1992 he worked for Sequoia Pacific Voting Systems. Both Diebold and Sequoia are bidding to work in North Carolina.

"If you hire somebody without any experience in voting and elections, you're going to have to hire someone who is going to have a big learning curve that will put this project in jeopardy because of our tight timeline we're on," said Gary Bartlett, the state elections director.

Electronic voting machines have become a sensitive and closely watched issue in North Carolina following the 2004 elections.

Although there were other glitches throughout the nation and the state, a faulty Carteret County voting system became "Exhibit A" when it lost 4,438 votes, plunging the Commissioner of Agriculture election into uncertainty for months.

That failure helped drive the revamp of North Carolina's rules for electronic voting devices.

The contracts that Long is helping put in place will help counties replace what is deemed unreliable hardware with equipment that meets state and federal guidelines.

Anyone involved in that process must "be like Caesar's wife, above all question and reproach," said activist David Allen, of High Point.

Allen and others affiliated with N.C. Verified Voting a group that has raised questions about the use of electronic voting machines and is skeptical of the state's efforts to manage them say Long does not meet that standard.

"I feel this guy has no business being involved in any way, shape or form with the process," said Allen, a longtime critic of voting machines and a member of the ad hoc study committee that proposed changes to the state's voting laws earlier this year.

Allen, who has been criticizing Long's North Carolina involvement by way of a blog, said it is not just the fact that Long worked for Diebold that is troubling, it is the work he did.

According to his resume, Long was the project manager responsible for installing 22,000 Diebold voting machines throughout Georgia in 2002.

Although both Diebold and Georgia officials have repeatedly proclaimed that election a success Georgia has since bought more Diebold machines advocates critical of electronic voting machines are also critical of the election. They point to problems reported with those machines and a lengthy "punch list" of problem items the state submitted to Diebold after the election.

"We were able to take an order and deliver on an election six months later in 159 counties," Long said Friday. "That's pretty successful in my mind."

He continued, "there was nothing that came up during my six months down there that jeopardized anybody's vote."

Joyce McCloy, who helps lead the N.C. Verified Voting group, questioned whether Long had lingering ties to Diebold, a company that is among the most-stringently attacked by those skeptical of electronic voting systems.

"It just worries me, makes me wonder, if someone who was so heavily involved with Diebold can be impartial," McCloy said.

Long said he neither works for nor owns stock in any of the companies that have bid for North Carolina's business. And an agreement he signed when hired by North Carolina prohibits him from soliciting jobs or contracts from those companies while he is working for the state.

Under his contract, Long helped write the request for proposals, now answered by five companies, for voting machines.

A committee will decide which of those companies should be able to sell machines, both computer devices as well as machines that read optical forms. Long does not sit on that committee.

After the vendors are chosen either in December or January he will also help counties install their new equipment.