County calls for help.
The Citizen's Voice. July 24, 2007 BY MICHAEL P. BUFFER STAFF WRITER 
  
In a letter to state officials, Luzerne County Director of Elections Leonard Piazza bashed the company that provided the county’s voting machines and asked for financial help to pay for a three-year warranty priced at more than $300,000.

The county last year spent $2.4 million in federal money to buy 750 touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems & Software, and a one-year warranty has expired on roughly half of the machines and will expire on the rest this year.

“In addition to not being able to meet the financial burden that ES&S is asking us to meet, we cannot individually deal with such a large, multi-national corporation and the mix of deception this company promulgates,” Piazza wrote in a July 19 letter to Deputy Secretary of the Commonwealth Thomas J. Weaver and Harry A. VanSickle, commissioner of the state bureau of commissions, elections and legislation.

Piazza asked the state to help ensure “that voting-system vendors doing business here do not have the opportunity to threaten the democratic process with such unsavory business practices that vendors, such as ES&S, seemingly have a deep commitment to employing.”

The county rushed to buy the ES&S machines to meet a federal mandate in the May 2006 primary election and avoid losing federal grant money. ES&S and other vendors said in March 2006 that warranty arrangements could be negotiated after a system was in place, Piazza said.

A representative of ES&S could not be reached for comment Monday. Spokeswoman Amanda Brown said last week company prices reflect “the cost of providing quality elections systems and services.”

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania is trying to resolve the warranty issue with ES&S for Luzerne County and 32 other counties in the state, Piazza said last week.