corporate interests. He's only changed his position for the Senate race. Will he only support corporate interests in the Senate over the people's?
While a certain amount of government-industrial overlap is to be expected, what is startling about the voting-machine industry is the degree to which this symbiosis has been institutionalized. This is due, in large part, to a curious nonprofit entity called the Election Center and its versatile executive director, Doug Lewis. The Election Center’s members include approximately 1,000 dues-paying state and local election-administration officials, as well some voting-machine vendors. The center provides a host of services for its members, informing them of new developments in election law, sponsoring professional development conferences, and offering training workshops for new election officials. In advance of the last election, the center also performed a quasi-oversight role over the machine-testing process. Specifically, the Election Center, in conjunction with the National Association of State Election Directors, selected which private labs would test new voting-machine technologies.
But in the eyes of many voting-rights activists, the Election Center (and Lewis in particular) acts as a tireless advocate for the industry’s interests. In March, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the center has received tens of thousands of dollars from the major voting-machine vendors in the United States. Lewis also had a hand in forming the e-voting industry’s trade association. In August of 2003, Lewis and Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the country’s largest IT trade association, hosted a conference call with the presidents of the major e-voting-machine vendors. Academics, such as the indefatigable paper-trail advocate David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, had been publicly questioning the security and viability of DRE systems, and the press was beginning to catch on. In the conference call, Lewis, Miller, and the executives banded together to form a coherent public-relations counteroffensive under the auspices of a new trade association, later called the Electronic Technology Council, to be created as a subsidiary of the ITAA; membership was to be around $100,000 per company. On the council’s Web site, an official statement of neutrality on the issue of voter-verified paper ballots is quickly followed by a long list of reasons why such a requirement would, in fact, be onerous.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8969