Chris Adams

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported that the San Diego Registrar of Voters wants to continue full-speed with a Diebold deployment. This is scary stuff - serious allegations have been made casting Diebold's product quality into question: even if the company is correct and all of the problems have been fixed the fact that the system is of such dubious design and implementation quality would make any prudent buyer insist on a comprehensive evaluation. McPherson should be leading this public inquiry but instead she's acting more like a company spokesperson:

There's no reason to go with a different vendor," County Registrar of Voters Sally McPherson said. "The analysis was completed outside the total context of the election process. They looked at one piece of the software."

Diebold executives jetted to San Diego and other cities to smooth things over with McPherson and her national counterparts. They vehemently defended their so-called e-voting systems, saying the Johns Hopkins researchers used an old software code, failed to contact company programmers and had limited understanding about how elections are conducted.

Important issues being decided in backrooms away from public scrutiny - anyone want to guess how long it will be before San Diego is being referred to as the West Coast's Palm Beach?