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[FONT face=Verdana color=#ff0000]2-17-06: Election family tree: Who got us into this and how did they meet each other?[/FONT][/SPAN]
As we unravel the family tree responsible for the current elections mess, to our surprise it looks like some of these people are in fact legally related. This article exposes some of the ties, family and otherwise. Let's open the closet and look at some of the underpinnings of today's secret elections:
Two of the most ardent proponents of election secrecy and paperless voting, Los Angeles County Registrar of Elections Conny McCormack and former San Bernardino Registrar Scott Konopasek, appear to be practically brother and sister-in-law, yet we can't find that they have disclosed this.
"I'm too dumb to sleep," wrote Riverside County (Calif.) activist Art Cassel after discovering information hinting at a family relationship. He was joined online in the wee hours of the night last weekend by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. Soon, Cassel and several BBV researchers were running down more information to learn more about McCormack and Konopasek's relationship.
A recent obituary reported that a family included a son (Austin McCormack, Conny's husband) and Kathryn Konopasek, a daughter. Seeing this
Dallas Morning News article, Riverside County activist Art Cassel contacted
Black Box Voting. We found that Kathryn "Kate" Konopasek, Conny's sister-in-law, is married to Dean Konopasek. The name Konopasek is quite rare. Cassel found that Scott Konopasek, who now lives in Highland Calif., went to high school in Utah and attended Brigham Young University. Dean Konopasek, who now lives in Alaska, attended Utah State University around the same time. Black Box Voting found that no other family named Konopasek appears to have resided in Utah at any time. Circumstances do support the hypothesis that Dean and Scott are siblings, but we do not have documentation on that yet.
[FONT color=#ff0000]Konopasek's current company: Forefront Election Solutions[/FONT] [A href="vny!://www.forefrontelections.com/" target=_blank]vny!://www.forefrontelections.com/[/A]
When the King County general election in 2004 didn't pass the smell test, Konopasek's Forefront Election Solutions was suggested to "audit" the election. Forefront lost that deal to another enigmatic entity: The Election Center, run by R. Doug Lewis.
While in Sacramento this week, BBV investigator Jim March pulled the corporate documents of Forefront Election Solutions. Currently, Scott Konopasek and his sidekick Stephen Trout are running the company. They launched it in 2004 when Konopasek was fired from his position in San Bernardino County.
Forefront Election Solutions LLC is an elections consulting firm that reportedly was involved in a pitch for a telephone voting system to Los Angeles County Elections. Activists who attended the meeting reported the involvement in Los Angeles County of Konopasek and Forefront to Black Box Voting.
[FONT color=#ff0000]What McCormack and Konopasek have in common[/FONT] Konopasek and McCormack have raised the ire of voting activists for their outspoken opposition to a paper trail (McCormack, as recently as last June, was advocating against a paper trail in public testimony). Both are over-the-top practitioners of secrecy against the citizenry in elections.
Konopasek referred to
Black Box Voting as conducting a "jihad," comparing activists to terrorists at a California public hearing while complaining about a proposed plan to have citizens monitor elections.
In July 2004, Konopasek admitted to BBV investigators that he has sometimes adjusted election data during elections. At the time, BBV investigators were asking if Konopasek knew of any reason that could cause vote totals to go down for a candidate in the middle of a count (which happened to Howard Dean, a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, in March 2004 in Mohave County, AZ). Konopasek replied that this had happened under his watch in San Bernardino. He claimed that it was due to a need to "massage the data" between the tabulator and the voting machine, adding that the problem had been solved.
This attracted the interest of Adam Cohen, a member of the
New York Times editorial board, who -- unbeknownst to Konopasek -- happened to be observing the BBV investigators. He had been quietly sitting on a bench in the San Bernardino elections office while Konopasek made this surprising statement. Cohen immediately got up, made a notation, and asked for details. Cohen had joined Black Box Voting for the visit to San Bernardino, and Konopasek's admission ended up in the
New York Times on Aug. 8, 2004.
[FONT color=#ff0000]Paperless pushers: Like one big happy family -- The elections money-go-round[/FONT] Before heading to San Bernardino, where Konopasek purchased Sequoia paperless touch-screens, Konopasek pushed paperless Sequoia touch-screens into Snohomish County (WA). Snohomish has since dropped the machines.
Prior to Snohomish County, Konopasek was elections supervisor for Salt Lake County (UT), the location that also spawned paperless touch-screen advocate Michael Vu who is now Cuyahoga County (OH) director of elections.
Vu became Salt Lake County elections supervisor not long after Konopasek left. At the age of 28, Vu took over mammoth Cuyahoga County (OH) elections. When visited by BBV investigators Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, Vu cited Riverside County (CA) registrar of elections Mischelle Townsend as his "mentor."
Townsend, who resigned suddenly after a series of inquiries by local citizens, is listed on Konopasek's web site for Forefront Election Solutions as one of the consultants.
It was this meeting with Vu that stimulated the formation of the Black Box Voting nonprofit group. Harris and Kathleen Wynne, the activist who first pioneered the voting machine reform issue in Cleveland, had been horrified at Vu's energetic and arrogant promotion of a paperless Diebold touch-screen system. After hearing that he was mentored by Mischelle Townsend (who was at that time under investigation for allowing a Sequoia technician to upload data into the tabulator during a live election), Harris decided that it was time to create a formal group to investigate what is really going on behind the scenes in U.S. elections. Harris and Wynne ditched a luncheon meeting in Cleveland to discuss the idea and six weeks later,
Black Box Voting, Inc. was born.
Back to the paperless pitch people: Stephen Trout, who was Konopasek's sidekick in San Bernardino, had been with former Calif. Secretary of State Bill Jones. After his tenure as Secretary of State, Jones went on to pitch Sequoia touch-screens as a "consultant" for Sequoia. And if that wasn't fishy enough, when anti-paperless touch-screen Secretary of State Kevin Shelley took over in California, Trout left to help Konopasek get Sequoia paperless touch-screens into San Bernardino County.
McCormack behaves as if Diebold is family as well. At one time, she went on a personal vacation with then-Diebold salesperson Deborah Seiler. At the California VSPP meetings, in a room filled with people, McCormack typically sits with Diebold. McCormack's picture has been on the Diebold Web site advertising its products.
McCormack's commitment to nontransparent elections was exposed when her staff [A href="vny!://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/13095.html" target=_blank]pulled a bait and switch[/A] on observers in November 2005, telling reporters and citizens that optical scan machines were the tallying machines. When asked about this by Harris, McCormack's staff admitted that tallying is done in another location, off limits and not viewable by the public. Harris questioned McCormack about this violation of California law. McCormack refused to allow Harris (or any other member of the public) to observe the tallying and instead called in five members of the Los Angeles County sheriff's department to guard Harris and others, lest the citizenry make a break for it to attempt to watch any vote tallying.
In July 2005, BBV's Jim March was [A href="vny!://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/8556.html" target=_blank]arrested in San Diego County[/A] when he tried to watch the vote-counting.
[FONT color=#ff0000]It's time for full disclosure[/FONT] Whether or not they like secrecy, Konopasek and McCormack need to disclose any family relationship. If they are brother and sister-in-law, this is clearly relevant to any recommendations, endorsements, special access, and business dealings. It would be likely that they would have met at their weddings, perhaps decades ago, and any interfacing of their public elections work should be examined.
Conny Drake McCormack married Austin McCormack in Dallas, Texas. She had been in charge of jury pools, was then moved up to Supervisor of Elections in Dallas County, where she immediately got into hot water for allegedly disenfranchising minority voters by shorting them on ballots. BBV investigator Kathleen Wynne has obtained the court documents on that investigation, and she will be posting those soon.
McCormack was subjected to a two-year investigation by the Texas attorney general's office for alleged election-rigging, in connection with the 1985 election of Dallas Mayor Starke Taylor (an interesting character in his own right; to finance development of property he was hoping to develop, pending a land use decision by city officials -- he was one of the officials -- he took out a loan with a savings and loan association that he also owned. He defaulted on his loan and the S&L went out of business. Then he sued the S&L for making bad loans.)
The investigation in McCormack's alleged rigging of Starke Taylor's election was eventually dropped, after McCormack left the state of Texas to take a position in San Diego County, replacing Ray Ortiz. Together, MCormack and Ortiz had been leading a national association of elections officials when Ortiz was indicted on several counts of fraud. McCormack subsequently took Ortiz's position in San Diego. Ortiz went to work for a voting machine vendor.
[FONT color=#ff0000]Time for Southern Calif. citizens to get to work on this[/FONT] Let us know if you'd like guidance on what records to seek. More information needs to be obtained about why Konopasek was fired, how he was selected and hired in the first place, and what Forefront Election Solutions is doing.
If Konopasek's firm, Forefront, is doing business with Los Angeles County, it needs to be determined how he gained access to Los Angeles County for the telephone voting sales pitch. Who paid for his "consulting" services?
Black Box Voting is conducting public records requests to learn whether McCormack has hired Forefront for anything, and if so, if she disclosed any family relationship with Konopasek. We are also seeking records as to whether Konopasek listed McCormack as a reference, or obtained recommendations from her, in any of his work with either San Bernardino or other counties.
RESEARCH WAS CONTRIBUTED FOR THIS ARTICLE BY ART CASSEL, BEV HARRIS, KATHLEEN WYNNE, JIM MARCH AND CATHERINE ANSBRO.
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