NM's Recount Prevention Department

From the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network (via our friend in Taos):

Bought and paid for in the Land of Enchantment -- why interfere with the process outright, when you can pretend to cooperate while raising the bar impossibly high?

This gets interesting -- according to the Institute on Money in State Politics website, Ms. Vigil-Giron's 6th largest campaign contributor in 2002 was one Ken Carbullido, vice president of Election Systems and Software (ES&S)...

Rebecca Vigil-Giron is a Democrat, and other major campaign contributors include the New Mexico Federation of Labor. If that initially throws you off the scent, it's understandable -- I did a double take before thinking it through. Welcome to the confounding world of American elections, where the conflicts of interest seem to wedge their way in, heedless of other affiliations.

PR Newswire, Sept 25, 2003

The New Mexico Secretary of State has awarded a five-year, multi-million dollar agreement to Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S), to build, deploy, and support a HAVA-compliant, centralized, real-time, statewide voter registration and election management system...

Such a cozy relationship, these Secretaries of State and their election-system benefactors. That isn't much of a secret:

Shortly after leaving office, former California Secretary of State Bill Jones sent letters to each member of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, reassuring them that the electronic voting machines they wanted to buy were reliable.

One month after Jones sent the letters, the Republican became a paid consultant for Sequoia Voting Systems, a touch-screen manufacturer that was bidding for Santa Clara County's $19 million contract and ultimately won it.

Critics say Jones' move illustrates a troubling reality of elections in the electronic age: close, often invisible, bonds link election officials to the equipment companies they are supposed to regulate...

In addition to hiring former secretaries of state and their staffs, voting equipment companies help pay for a multitude of industry conferences, including those sponsored by organizations like the National Association of Secretaries of State, or NASS.

"Personally, I've known a lot of these people for a long time, and we've become a family," said Rebecca Vigil-Giron, New Mexico's secretary of state and NASS' president-elect.

According to an NASS spokeswoman, the fees paid by corporate sponsors such as Diebold, ES&S, IBM and Accenture account for more than half of the association's $420,000 budget.

When does this start to matter? About the time this same individual decides to ensure the products of these companies never get properly audited.

These recount efforts represent an priceless opportunity to study the large-scale implementation of a system both vital to our democracy, and imperiled by credible accusations of vulnerability -- or worse. If the systems work as well as the industry reps -- that is, the ones padding Ms. Vigil-Giron's expense account -- claim, then such an analysis would vindicate them -- and put these questions to bed.

Leads inevitably to a rather disturbing question, doesn't it? Perhaps answered in part by understanding these collusive links? Does New Mexico have the courage to ask it?