http://www.dispatch.com/election.php?story=dispatch/2005/07/16/20050716-A1-00.html&chck=t/
The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio's Greatest Online Newspaper
Diebold rep gave $10,000 to county GOP
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Doug Caruso , Joe Hallett and Robert Vitale
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
A contractor who represents Diebold Election Systems arrived
at the office of Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matthew
Damschroder with an open checkbook on the same day the county was opening bids
for voter-registration software.
Pasquale "Pat" Gallina arrived unannounced,
Damschroder said.
"I’m here to give you $10,000," the elections
director recalls Gallina saying. "Who do I make it payable to?"
"Well, you’re certainly not going to make it out to
me," Damschroder says he told Gallina. "But I’m sure the Franklin
County Republican Party would appreciate a donation."
Gallina wrote the check, and Damschroder says he took it on
Jan. 9, 2004. That weekend, Damschroder said, he mailed the check to the county
party. Damschroder had been executive director of the party until June 2003,
when he was appointed director of the elections board.
[photo]
Elections Director Matthew Damschroder could be disciplined
for accepting the check.
Diebold, the highest of four bidders, didn’t get the
software contract, and Damschroder says he never recommended the company.
Gallina said yesterday that the $10,000 was his money and
had nothing to do with Diebold. He said he’s always supported county Republican
parties in areas where he lives.
"I donate to Licking and to Franklin," he said.
The check incident remained between Gallina and Damschroder
until late last month when an assistant county prosecutor called Damschroder.
Election Systems & Software, a company that is suing Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell over the state’s policies for buying electronic voting
machines, wanted to talk with Damschroder about allegations that Diebold was
paying to play, the prosecutor told him.
Damschroder told him about the $10,000 check and had another
story to tell.
In May, he said, Gallina called him and bragged about a
$50,000 check he had written to Blackwell’s "political interests."
"Isn’t it great that Diebold and the county are going to
do business?" he says Gallina asked him.
Damschroder said Gallina went on to tell him that he had met
with Norm Cummings, a Blackwell campaign consultant, in Washington, D.C., to
work out a deal: Diebold would cut the price of its electronic voting machines
to $2,700 each if the company had a guarantee that it would receive all of the
state’s business.
"Then Gallina tells me that he then wrote a check for
$50,000 to Blackwell’s political interests."
Carlo LoParo, Blackwell’s spokesman, called Damschroder’s
assertions "wild accusations" and said, "You can’t point me to
anything that substantiates what he says."
LoParo acknowledged that Gallina had contributed to
Blackwell’s campaigns since 1998 — Blackwell received $8,000 from Gallina
during that period — but denied that any of Blackwell’s campaign interests
received $50,000 from Diebold or Gallina. Blackwell is running for governor.
"I have no idea why he (Damschroder) would say anything
like that other than that every encounter we’ve had with Matt Damschroder has
shown a little bit about his character," LoParo said.
Gallina would not say yesterday whether he wrote a $50,000
check to any organization associated with Blackwell. He would say only that all
of his donations are public record. He would not say whether he wrote a $50,000
check to a 527 organization, which does not have to report donations, or to a
political fund that has not yet been required to disclose its financial
statements this year.
He blamed rival election machine vendor ES &S and racism
for the allegations. He is of Italian descent, and Blackwell is black.
"A lot of this has been racially driven, a lot of it is
vendordriven," he said.
In April, Blackwell announced that he had negotiated a new
price for touch-screen voting machines from Diebold, which would allow the
state to buy enough touch screens for counties that want them. Based on state
rules requiring such systems to have paper printers, Diebold’s machine would be
the only choice.
Damschroder has clashed with Blackwell’s office since before
the 2004 elections, when he criticized and sometimes defied directives he said
would hinder voter registration.
In the months since the election, he has questioned orders
by Blackwell that first would have had counties choose paper-ballot voting
systems and then would have limited their electronic-voting choices to only
Diebold machines.
LoParo said Blackwell appointed a team to negotiate prices
with voting-machine vendors and he denied that Gallina and Cummings negotiated
a deal.
"We opted for a competitively bid, multivendor
approach," LoParo said. "This process has been open and transparent,
and we negotiated the best prices in the nation."
He said the "unfortunate situation is that Matt did
something he shouldn’t be doing" by taking the $10,000 contribution in his
office from Gallina.
Damschroder agreed that he made a mistake when he took the
check.
"I should have thrown Mr. Gallina out of the
building," he said yesterday.
Board of Elections Chairman William A. Anthony Jr., who’s
also chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party, said the four-member
elections board is considering suspending Damschroder.
County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien is investigating whether
Damschroder broke any laws, Anthony said, and has already recommended that the
elections board fire Damschroder.
The elections board meets on Monday. O’Brien declined to
comment.
Meanwhile, ES &S wants to depose Blackwell, Gallina,
Cummings and Dana Walch, Blackwell’s director of legislative affairs.
ES &S sued Blackwell in May, saying it was unfairly
excluded from the selection process.
Blackwell ordered counties to make their selections by May
13, but only Diebold was certified to sell electronic voting machines in Ohio.
ES &S said Blackwell had met secretly with officials from the North Canton
company.
Franklin County and 31 others joined the suit, and Blackwell
agreed last month to push the deadline back to September. The change wasn’t a
settlement of the lawsuit, however.
Ohio must use new voting machines in the 2006 elections to
qualify for federal funding through a congressionally mandated upgrade.
dcaruso@dispatch.com
jhallett@dispatch.com
rvitale@dispatch.com
Copyright © 2005, The Columbus Dispatch
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