The Registrar of Voters Issue

Vote fixing; It’s not just for Cuyahoga anymore
Thursday, May 24, 2007

San Diego – A fellow columnist already wrote the essential parts of this story. She doesn’t need me retelling it, but she’s good enough to let me do so because it’s the kind of story that pisses me off. It really pisses me off. It really, really, really pisses me off. I’m pissed off at San Diego County Supervisors Greg Cox, Bill Horn, Diane Jacob, Ron Roberts and Pam Slater-hyphen-Price, but they aren’t the half of it. I’m mostly pissed off at the majority (at least the narrow majority) of us San Diego voters who keep sending such unrepentant, narcissistic, influence-trading, do-nothing reptiles back to their seats on that nefarious board and I’m pissed off at everyone who isn’t repulsed by the stench emanating from their dais to the point of beating plowshares into swords with which to drive out the source of that stench by any means necessary.

I have plenty of scurrilous things to say about our Supervisors and some not at all flattering remarks to make about the rest of us. But those need to wait until I retell my colleague’s story.

Here’s what happened. A little while back the County hired one Michael Vu to fill the second highest position in the Registrar of Voters office. “So what?’ you’ll ask. “Who gives a shit who’s the number two dog at an obscure county agency that, other than offering ludicrously seductive compensation packets, cushy digs and backroom favoritism to its insiders, really doesn’t matter worth a hill of beans?”

Shame on you. The Registrar of Voters is arguably the most important unelected public office in any jurisdiction and his or her executive staffers have the power to direct the very course of our noble experiment in participatory government. If you haven’t reflected upon that fact lately, do so now. I’ll wait . . .

O.k. Glad you’re back. Sorry to get all poli-sci on you, but damn it all, democracy matters, or at least it should. And here’s the problem with Michael Vu being second in charge at the Registrar’s office: the sumbitch just resigned in disgrace from his job as the first in charge at the Registrar’s office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where a federal elections investigation turned up enough evidence to convict two of his underlings on charges that they rigged election results in a swing state, arguably aiding and abetting W and his army of darkness in their second theft of the most powerful throne on earth. Vu’s salary in Ohio was $120,000 a year. In San Diego, it’s $130,000. Read that again. Seriously. Read it again.

He got a $10,000-a-year raise and a chance to get the hell out of Cuyahoga County and flounce his either inept or malevolent self down on the shores of the Pacific and he got it from a county government that either hasn’t got sense enough to poor piss out of a boot or hasn’t got integrity enough to pretend like it’s not a disgusting, palm-greasing box of herpetic weasels. He’s the Assistant Registrar of Voters here now. He’s the second most powerful person in charge of your participation in a constitutional democratic republic. Feeling confident? I know I am.

Anyhow, there was still a job left to fill over at the County Registrar’s office, namely, the job of the big cheese, a position left vacant by the departure of Mikel Haas, who served 13 years in that capacity and not only can’t spell his own first name correctly but also presided over the Busby/Bilbray vote morass just six months back and was, by all accounts, as partisan a registrar as any in the country. He left his job as Registrar to take a promotion. He is now the Assistant Chief Administrative Officer for the County and God only knows what he’s pulling down salary-wise. Boy howdy, now I’m feeling doubly confident about County Government. How about you?

But enough about a guy who got run out of Cuyahoga for being a shiftless turd and a guy who bounced from malfeasance to reward for playing the right party’s game. Let’s get to the good stuff.

So there’s this vacancy, see, and the County starts a nationwide search to fill it and lo and behold, a perfect candidate presents herself and the Board jumps on her like a chicken on a June bug. She’s perfect. They offer her a job. Her name is Deborah Seiler and the Board announced on the 14th of this month that she will be the one to steer the ship of suffrage through the murky waters of conversion to an era of new technology and a resultant new relationship between an involved and invested people and the leadership that ostensibly represents their interests in the setting of public policy and the husbandry of the common well. That’s a solemn duty. She must be a real humdinger, no?

Well, there are humdingers and then there are humdingers. Let’s start with Ms. Seiler’s career in public service. She spent the past 19 months working as the Assistant Registrar in Solano County, California, a not insignificant county with a population about 14 percent that of our own. That probably sounded dismissive. I don’t mean to suggest that being the second most powerful vote rigging overseer in a Podunk place scarcely qualifies one to be the most powerful one in a big place. That’s for others to decide. God knows I’m not a County Supervisor. It requires perspicacity to hold down that job. It requires that one have the attention span to look into a résumé before installing its author as the gatekeeper of popular rule.

Surely our County Board did that. Surely they not only read Ms. Seiler’s résumé, but also looked behind it. Surely they called references. And since they surely did so, surely they learned that in the interstices between her 12-year stint at the California Secretary of State’s office and her service to the good people of Solano County, she spent over a decade in the private sector, first at Sequoia Voting Systems, then at Diebold Election Systems as a sales representative. Even if her career in public service only marginally qualified her as a candidate to fill the seat left vacant by Haas’ promotion, surely her career in the private sector rounded her out, no? You be the judge.

It turns out that while working as the Diebold sales rep to Solano County (the Podunk place that gave her the job as number two behind the Registrar), Seiler sold 1,200 voting machines to the county that were neither federally tested nor state certified. Solano County actually had to buy replacements from a competitor once it learned that Seiler’s product was deficient and had to pay Seiler’s employer, Diebold, $400,000 to get out of its contract for shit that didn’t past muster in the first place. Now THAT certainly qualifies a person to be Registrar of Voters in San Diego County. You go, Deb. The job’s yours for the taking. Name your price.

Naturally, then, the Board installs Seiler by decree. I wasn’t there. The Board never invites me to coronation ceremonies. I, like the majority of us, have to hope that the business of government gets done ethically but I don’t usually know if it does on account of I ain’t there to watch it. I didn’t see it happen. But I don’t have to see a rape to know what it looks like. It isn’t pretty. This one in particular was one ugly, dry-holed, violent motherfucker. Those swine – Cox, Horn, Jacobs, Roberts and Slater, shoved that duplicitous bitch down our throats, smacked us on our collective rump, got up and made themselves sandwiches. That’s what they do. They can. They’re remorseless beasts with a guarantee of six-figure incomes for life who’d no sooner rock a boat than tell the truth. They haven’t the scruples of a whale hunter or the feeling of a carrot. They’re a chimerical pod of flabby-necked, dissembling eunuchs and vituperating harpies and they wouldn’t piss on you or me if we were on fire. (Told you I had something to say about those fuck stains.)

But vile, loathsome, seminal drippings though those corpulent, effete cunts and cock suckers are, they don’t get close to irking me as badly as do the motley, cow-eyed assortment of fact-eschewing, oblivious scrota that elect them time after merciless fucking time. (Told you I’ve got something to say about us, too.) Folks, the evidence is plain as day. Our County Board is as interested in open, responsible progressive governance as it is in Heisenberg’s principle. There is no mystery about that fact – they don’t do anything or care about anything and we just keep rewarding their inefficacy and indifference.

Quick – don’t Google this shit – who’s your County Supervisor? I bet half of you don’t know. I bet. Seriously. You can write me and tell me you know, but half of you don’t. I’ve quoted Thomas Jefferson before. I’ll do it again. People get the government they deserve.

Brothers and sisters, I say and I say again the fault lies not in your rulers but your self rule. You don’t really care – not enough of you anyway. If you did, you’d do something. But you’re just like me. You’re content in your middle-classdom, your health coverage, your relative assurance that you’ll have enough money to live on when you’re old and your delusion that even if all is not as it should be, it is as it must be. I, for one, will not subscribe any longer to such naïve optimism or such cynical fatalism. It ought not be this way and god damn it, it need not.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t very well storm the County building screaming "J’acuse," nor can I run your elections myself. The only thing I can think to do at the moment is to write this story and promulgate it far and wide, asking each of you who reads it to copy and paste the address from your navigation bar into an email to your contacts and so on, and so on, and so on. So I’ve done what I can do, for the moment, and I hope you do what you can.

I wish you all a happy Thursday,
Tony