    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 10461
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, April 25, 2009 - 3:13 pm: | 
|
In the documentary "Hacking Democracy" you may remember a scene where I interviewed voting machine examiner Shawn Southworth using a hidden camera, as he fumbled questions about shoddy voting machine testing practices. The Ciber voting machine examination lab was a subsidiary of Colorado-based Ciber Inc., which is implicated in this story in a New Orleans pay-to-play controversy.
The deal in New Orleans, described in the story below, involved companies dumping cash into campaigns and related political action committees, and letting certain politicians run up expenses on credit cards -- a common mechanism for bribery. Mayor Ray Nagin appears unable to explain why his wife's expenses show up on a vendor's credit card.
Ciber has many divisions; the scandal below involves its "governmental services division."
Ciber's voting machine testing unit has been in and out of play in the elections industry, due to its propensity for unexplainable omissions in its software examinations. This article is relevant because it illustrates some of the mechanics for influence-peddling, as well as the ethics of one of the main companies that has handled voting machine certification.
The Times-Picayune - April 24, 2009, by David Hammer and Gordon Russell
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/mayor_ray_nagins_deposition_do.html
Mayor Ray Nagin's deposition downplays relationship with vendor Mark St. Pierre, but campaign records show different
In a deposition this week, Mayor Ray Nagin downplayed his familiarity with the city technology vendor who financed trips and gratuities for Nagin and another city official, but campaign and media reports show Mark St. Pierre played a key fundraising role in the mayor's 2006 re-election.
In the developing scandal over alleged influence-peddling, centering on the abortive crime-camera project in New Orleans' technology office, Nagin has said he thought his chief technology officer, Greg Meffert, was paying for lavish gifts, including trips their families took to Hawaii and Chicago.
In fact, St. Pierre's company NetMethods was paying for the junkets, providing Meffert with a credit card to use for Nagin and others. Nagin and his attorney have said the mayor was largely unaware of St. Pierre's role in the crime-camera project, now the subject of a civil lawsuit by firms that held the initial contract and claim they were unfairly pushed aside in favor of St. Pierre's business interests.
Asked in Monday's deposition by plaintiffs' lawyer Glad Jones whether he knows St. Pierre, the mayor responded: "I have met Mr. St. Pierre at . . . City Hall functions.
"All I know is he was a subcontractor that had a team of technical experts that worked on various projects for the city, " Nagin added.
The mayor also said he didn't remember a trip in early May 2006 to Chicago with his wife, Seletha, in which the Nagins stayed at the same hotel as St. Pierre.
As it turns out, St. Pierre was intimately involved in Nagin's visit. The Chicago Sun-Times reported at the time that Nagin held a fundraiser on the 40th floor of the Prudential Plaza in Chicago's Loop on May 8, raising $500,000, according to organizers. In its May 5-7 edition, the Chicago Defender reported that St. Pierre was a member of the event's host committee.
Nagin was lagging badly in fundraising at the time, and the event gave him a needed boost less than two weeks before he defeated Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in a close runoff. The Nagin campaign's claims of raising $500,000 that night appear to be overstated: Nagin later said the event took in half that amount, and the real sum appears to be smaller. It's impossible to nail down the figure exactly, because few donors used Illinois addresses and checks apparently trickled in well after the event.
Donations from vendors
Regardless, donations were driven to a great degree by vendors who played a key role in the crime-camera deal.
In addition to St. Pierre and some Chicago politicians, the Defender reported, the event host committee included Ed Burns, president of Ciber Inc.'s government division, and Royce Banks, president of the Technology Consortium Group.
Ciber held a large no-bid city contract in the technology department, overseeing some of the work performed by St. Pierre's companies, and later took control of the camera project. The New Orleans inspector general alleged that Burns, of Ciber, paid a gratuity to one of Meffert's successors as tech chief, Anthony Jones, during his oversight of the camera project.
Technology Consortium Group, meanwhile, ended up managing the installation of the crime cameras, which largely haven't worked.
The inspector general has turned over its findings about the crime-camera deal to the FBI and U.S. Attorney Jim Letten.
In addition to helping host the Chicago event, St. Pierre maxed out his own contributions to the Nagin campaign. Around the time of the Chicago fundraiser, he had already given the maximum $5,000 donation in his own name and his companies doing business in the city technology office, Veracent and Imagine Software, gave Nagin's campaign $5,000 apiece.
St. Pierre then used his other firm, NetMethods, to donate $10,000 to Nagin's political action committee, CHANGE Inc., which was not bound by campaign contribution limits but was permitted to spend money on Nagin's re-election effort.
Ciber went even further, giving Nagin's PAC another $25,000.
Within a few days of the Chicago event, at least three other Ciber officials donated to the campaign: Joe Marchizza, a vice president, gave $5,000; Carla Capps, another vice president, gave $5,000; and Ben Schultz gave $500.
Memory lapses
Still, in Monday's deposition, the only time Nagin could remember traveling with St. Pierre was for the Saints' appearance in the NFC Championship game in Chicago in January 2007.
Nagin may have been under the impression that Meffert financed the fundraising trip, as the mayor said was his belief with the 2004 Hawaiian vacation the Nagins and Mefferts took together. It doesn't appear Meffert went to Chicago with the mayor and St. Pierre for the 2006 fundraiser, but in questioning Nagin on Monday, Jones indicated that Meffert used his NetMethods-issued credit card to pay nearly $700 for the Nagins' airfare and their stay at the Hyatt Regency.
Those expenses did not appear on Nagin's campaign reports, as required by law.
One of the plaintiffs in the civil case, Southern Electronics, donated $2,500 to Nagin in 2005, before the firm fell out of favor with City Hall on the surveillance-camera project. About a year later, Nagin said he talked with Meffert about possibly replacing Southern, and the city ended up replacing Southern with Dell, whose subcontractors included St. Pierre's Veracent.
Asked why his and his wife's expenses would have appeared on NetMethods' credit card, Nagin was bemused.
"The only thing I can think of possibly is if this was around the time of re-election and he arranged some fundraising trip out of town, " he said. "Other than that, I don't know."
Later in the deposition, Nagin added: "I don't know if it sounds inappropriate. It's just I don't recall this happening. You know, you'd have to talk to Greg about what he was doing. I don't even know if I used these tickets."
This article is also archived in the Vendors section of this Web site |
