Election Pros Are Cons

Copyright © 2004 by Seattle Weekly

BEV HARRIS HAS tangled with election bigwigs around the country. Her exposés of shady practices, conflicts of interest, and poor security in both the private and public sectors have helped ignite a national debate over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Now the 52-year-old Renton resident is claiming that there are local examples of lax security, too—at the King County Department of Records, Elections, and Licensing Services. She says the elections office has John Elder, a convicted drug dealer, printing ballots and Jeff Dean, a 23-count embezzler, programming software.

Dean says Harris is a "tabloid fruitcake." Most of her information "is not factually correct."

Elder says he cannot comment due to the policy of his employer, Diebold Election Systems—itself the target, nationwide, for activist scrutiny of its election computer systems. Through a spokesperson, Diebold says it is aware of Elder's background and sees no problem.

Dean Logan, the King County Director of Records and Elections, confirms that Elder is in a supervisory position with Diebold, which prints and sorts the county's absentee ballots, but he says Elder's criminal history is not an issue.

Logan also points out that Dean has not worked as a subcontractor for the county since April 2002, and "I've not seen anything to demonstrate that the systems in the past were compromised." Says Logan: "My greater confidence comes in knowing that the systems we are using today are fully secure."

Sophisticated Theft

In 1990, Dean was convicted of first-degree theft in King County for 23 counts of embezzlement of more than $385,000 from a law firm, where he was "a computer systems and accountant consultant," according to Superior Court records. Dean's thefts at the law firm, the records state, "occurred over a 2¹/2 -year period of time . . . The crimes and their cover-up involved a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim. . . . " Dean served just under four years for his crime and was released in 1995. His sentence spelled out the following condition: "Defendant shall be required to notify anyone for whom he works either as an employee or an independent contractor of his convictions. . . . "

Before his release, Dean told prison officials he had secured employment with Postal Services of Washington, in Seattle, which today is known as PSI. For years, the company has sorted and aggregated mail for clients, including ballots for King County Records and Elections.

Dean next shows up in the public record later in 1995, as the general manager for Spectrum Print and Mail Services in Mountlake Terrace, which was founded by his wife three years earlier. In 1998, Spectrum won the contract to print ballots for King County's new optical-scan voting system, which is in use today. By 1999, Dean was also the point man for implementation of a new software system to manage voter registration in King County.

At the time, Larry Alcantara was the director of King County Records and Elections and worked with Dean on both the new ballots and the new voter-registration system. Now retired, Alcantara had no knowledge of Dean's criminal history. "I'm shocked," he says. "I can understand folks being concerned. I am concerned."

Says voter advocate Harris, who has repeatedly warned about lax security in and oversight of new voting systems that depend on computer software: "I hate to be hard-nosed about this, but my worst fears were realized." She thinks it was completely inappropriate for Dean, a man with a history of computer-related crimes, to play a key role in the development of something as sensitive as voter-registration software. That's why she contends King County is a prime offender when it comes to lax election security. "Do we have people with inside access that shouldn't have it? Yes!"

Dean says the whole issue is overblown. He says Voter View, the voter-registration program that he was working on for the county, was never used by King County. "Voter View was a development project that never came to fruition," Dean says.

Logan, the current Records and Elections director, confirms that Voter View never came on line. In March 2003, the county and Diebold Election Systems, which had by then acquired the contract for Voter View, reached a court settlement on the company's failure to fulfill the contract for the software.

Activist Harris is not satisfied. She says Dean had "24-hour access to the building and the computer room and had direct access to both the personal information in the King County registration database and to the GEMS vote-tabulation program itself." Harris cites a confidential source for this information.

Logan confirms that Dean had a key to the office door of Records and Elections, inside the King County Administration Building downtown. The GEMS vote tabulation software, which counts ballots in King County, is stored in a room inside the Records and Elections office, Logan explains, and access to the computer room is limited to people who possess a code that opens a lock controlled by an electronic keypad. The code is only given to a few people. Logan himself does not have it and neither did previous director, Alcantara. Moreover, King County keeps a list of all the people who are given the code, and Dean is not on it.