{"id":4904,"date":"2007-08-02T10:51:05","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T17:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=4904"},"modified":"2007-08-03T01:23:49","modified_gmt":"2007-08-03T08:23:49","slug":"nytimes-the-revolving-door-of-partisan-election-officials-and-the-voting-machine-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/?p=4904","title":{"rendered":"NYTimes: The &#8216;Revolving Door&#8217; of Partisan Election Officials and the Voting Machine Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Blogged quickly by Brad from somewhere deep in the heart of Texas&#8230;<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Color us shocked. Elections Officials who oversee their own elections or those of their party leaders&#8230;and then go to work for the Voting Machine Companies they do business with\/apologize for. Hey, at least they&#8217;re now getting paid (publicly) for the lobbying work they were doing for those companies already.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/08\/01\/washington\/01voting.html\"><i>New York Times<\/i> notices<\/a> the problem we have with the way our electoral system &#8220;works&#8221; and how so many of those who run it seem to work for everyone <em>but<\/em> the <i>voters<\/i>&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"media\">Across the country, state voting officials routinely participate as candidates in races they are responsible for overseeing or act as leaders in their political parties. In the last presidential election, the secretaries of state in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, were chairmen of their states\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 re-election campaigns for President Bush.<\/p>\n<p>While federal ethics rules require lawmakers to wait a year after leaving office before they can take a job lobbying their former colleagues, <strong>no such rules exist for election officials, creating a revolving door between election administration and the voting machine industry. In recent years, top election officials in at least five states have moved from government posts directly into jobs as lobbyists for the voting machine industry&#8230;<\/strong><\/div>\n<p>And a note to <i>NY Times&#8217;<\/i> Ian Urbina: Good story. Though it would be a journalistic breath of fresh air if you avoided already discredited political operatives as quoted sources. E.g., folks like Robert Pastor of the hoax Baker\/Carter National Election Reform Commission and the anti-democratic GOP wingnut SoS of Indiana, Todd Rokita. Consider it a friendly request with appreciation that you seem to be back on this beat&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blogged quickly by Brad from somewhere deep in the heart of Texas&#8230; Color us shocked. Elections Officials who oversee their own elections or those of their party leaders&#8230;and then go to work for the Voting Machine Companies they do business with\/apologize for. Hey, at least they&#8217;re now getting paid (publicly) for the lobbying work they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}